A survey of shipping line Container Stowage Planning problems

Considerable growth in container transportation has been witnessed over the past two decades with an indispensable need for optimization. Several studies tackling problems related to container operations have been reported by the academic world since then. These studies mainly focus on operations performed either onboard container ships or at the port side. Container operations onboard ships aim to optimize the proper assignment of containers to the corresponding storage areas on container ships to gain improvement in cost, time, and stability. In literature, this problem is defined as Container Stowage Planning (CSP) problem. This problem is studied either by being decomposed into sub-problems or by being approached holistically. This paper provides a detailed survey of studies that focus on addressing the CSP problem. Specifically, we cover the two main sub-problems of CSP, namely the bay planning problem and the slot planning problem. Additionally, we discuss the current state-of-the-art solution approaches that aim to achieve efficient and effective container placement.