2D-packing with an application to stowage in Roll-on Roll-off liner shipping

Abstract

Roll-on/Roll-off (RoRo) ships represent the primary source for transporting vehicles and other types of rolling material over long distances. In this paper we focus on operational decisions related to stowage of cargoes for a RoRo ship voyage visiting a given set of loading and unloading ports. By focusing on stowage on one deck on board the ship, this can be viewed as a special version of a 2-dimensional packing problem with a number of additional considerations, such as one wants to place vehicles that belong to the same shipment close to each other to ease the loading and unloading. Another important aspect of this problem is shifting, which means temporarily moving some vehicles to make an entry/exit route for the vehicles that are to be loaded/unloaded at the given port. We present several versions of a new mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation for the problem. Computational results show that the model provides good solutions on small sized problem instances.