Container ship stowage plan using steepest ascent hill climbing, genetic, and simulated annealing algorithms

Container ship stowage plan is a vital subject on reducing additional cost from shifting and the vessel’s turn-around time in maritime ports. However, making proper stowage plan is not straightforward since this subject is literally known as a NP-hard problem. Several studies have been conducted to solve this problem despite it has not been dealt with completely. Hence, the principal objective of this study is to find optimal container stowage plan for container vessel calling at multiple ports. The most common way of finding the optimal solution is to consult algorithms for container vessel stowage problem. In this study, Steepest Ascent Hill Climbing, Genetic and Simulated Annealing algorithms are implemented considering the same size and two different types of containers (refrigerated and standard containers). After obtaining the numerical test results from three algorithms implementation, their performances for the problem solution are compared and evaluated.