A heuristic and a benchmark for the stowage planning problem

The stowage planning problem has recently gained the attention of a number of academic researchers. Unfortunately, many of the published works are either based on oversimplified assumptions or on confidential data. This practice hinders the research field from growing. In this paper, we present a novel set of realistic vessel data along with a set of benchmark instances. Moreover, a formal definition of a single-port stowage planning problem, based on the current state of the art, is presented. The proposed optimisation problem is solved using a variant of the adaptive large neighbourhood search framework, where novel repair and destroy methods are presented. Computational results show that the solution approach is able to find high-quality seaworthy stowage plans within 60 s.