Authors
Charlotte Vilhelmsen, Jesper Larsen, Richard Lusby
Publication date
2016/12
Journal
4OR
Volume
14
Issue
4
Pages
417-444
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Description
In bulk shipping, ships often have multiple tanks and carry multiple inhomogeneous products at a time. When operating such ships it is therefore a major challenge to decide how to best allocate cargoes to available tanks while taking into account tank capacity, safety restrictions, ship stability and strength as well as other operational constraints. The problem of finding a feasible solution to this tank allocation problem has been shown to be NP-Complete. We approach the problem on a tactical level where requirements for computation time are strict while solution quality is less important than simply finding a feasible solution. We have developed a heuristic that can efficiently find feasible cargo allocations. Computational results show that it can solve 99 % of the considered instances within 0.4 s and all of them if allowed longer time. We have also modified an optimality based method from the literature. The …
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