Lower And Upper Bounds For The Master Bay Planning Problem

In this work we tackle the problem of the stowage of containers on a ship, the so-called Master Bay Planning Problem (MBPP). This is an important hard combinatorial optimization problem in the context of maritime port logistics which has proven to be really difficult to solve. We propose two new lower bounds and two new upper bounds which are useful to solve it. In order to test both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the bounds proposed, we conduct an experiment over three different sets of instances. This allows us to determine the specific conditions in which the bounds can be used.