More researches have been done on automated stowage planning system in the past two decades, but with only a few real documented success stories. There are many variables to be considered in the stowage planning, inadequate planning may result in inefficient operations or at the worst substantial material damage to the ship, containers, and cargo. Good plan increases in contribution for a voyage, reduced re-stowage activities and cost at each terminal, quick vessel turn-around at every terminal, and maximum utilization of vessel. For every voyage, the demand, as well as service criteria, are different for different ports. When planning for multiple ports loading and discharging, the complexity of the plan will increase exponentially. Planning the optimized stowage for a single port pair considering multiple cargo types, container sizes, weights, and vessel restrictions is not a simple task as it looks, but in the real world, a vessel has to call multiple ports to make the whole operations economical and profitable. In simple terms, the goals are to protect the ship and the cargo, maximize capacity utilization, minimize loading and unloading time, cost at a port or terminal, minimize the bunkering to achieve effective seaworthy balance, and eventually resulting in maximizing contribution from a vessel. The idea is to develop an optimized stowage plan quickly and achieving multiple goals efficiently. The increase in the vessel capacity also resulted in an increased complexity of planning for efficient and effective stowage. With the advancement in technology, today we have ships that can carry more than 19,000 TEUs.
The traditional manual planning system may yield sub-optimal plans, take humongous man hours and efforts for large vessel planning and most of the time inefficient. Recent years the need for auto stowage planning is more pressing because of the increased planning complexity levels for the larger ships and increased stack heights. It is a program that automatically allocates bay slots on a vessel, by achieving the certain business objective, satisfying multiple constraints, restrictions and business rules.
Auto Stowage Planning System is a productivity tool for stowage planners.
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