An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the planar storage location assignment problem: application to stowage planning for Roll-on Roll-off ships

This paper considers a generalized version of the planar storage location problem arising in the stowage planning for Roll-on/Roll-off ships. A ship is set to sail along a predefined voyage where given cargoes are to be transported between different port pairs along the voyage. We aim at determining the optimal stowage plan for the vehicles stored on a deck of the ship so that the time spent moving vehicles to enable loading or unloading of other vehicles (shifting), is minimized. We propose a novel mixed integer programming model for the problem, considering both the stowage and shifting aspect of the problem. An adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) heuristic with several new destroy and repair operators is developed. We further show how the shifting cost can be effectively evaluated using Dijkstra’s algorithm by transforming the stowage plan into a network graph. The computational results show that the ALNS heuristic provides high quality solutions to realistic test instances. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.