A heuristic approach to stowage planning for ro-ro ships

With the continuous growth of the oversea automobile market, the freight rate rise and capacity shortage have occurred in the commercial vehicle market. In order to meet the export demand, many automobile companies began to order Rollon/Roll-off (Ro-Ro) Ships shipbuilding, hoping to control the transport capacity by establishing their own fleet. Stowage planning for Ro-Ro Ships is critical to ensure safety at sea. In order to improve the efficiency and safety of the stowage planning for Ro-Ro Ships, this paper presents an automatic stowage planning model. This model combines the improved discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm and the lowest horizontal line search algorithm as the encoding and decoding operations. The algorithm efficiently provides the deck stowage plan of the specialized ship, meeting different loading requirements. Finally, the algorithm proposed in this paper is compared with the improved genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm through simulation, proving that the algorithm can make reasonable stowage plans while ensuring the safety requirements of ship navigation, and preliminarily solve the automatic loading problem of large-scale Ro-Ro ships.