A heuristic for vessel planning in a reach stacker terminal

The vessel plan must comply with the stowage instructions provided by the shipping line, but should also expedite container transport operations in the yard. This paper presents an algorithm to generate the container ship loading plan using the tabu search and multistart techniques. The proposed algorithm considers the impact of container reshuffling, ground travel, and on-board weight distribution to judge the quality of alternative solutions. The computational performance of the algorithm is benchmarked using a MIP formulation of the problem. Experimental results from a Spanish terminal are presented.