Using a Bin Packing Approach for Stowing Hazardous Containers into Containerships

This chapter addresses the problem of determining stowage plans for containers into a ship, which is the so-called master bay plan problem (MBPP). As a novel issue and variant of MBPP, in the present work we consider the stowage of hazardous containers that follows the principles included in the segregation table of the International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) Code. Formally, the MBPP consists in determining how to stow a set of n containers, split into different groups, according to their size, type, class of weight and destinations, into a set of m available slots, that are locations either on the deck or in the stow, of predetermined bays of a containership. Some structural and operational constraints, related to both the containers and the ship, have to be satisfied. The need of stowing dangerous goods implies to take into account additional constraints to be verified in each slot concerning the safety of the whole cargo, for which dangerous goods are categorized into different types and forced to be stowed away from incompatible ones. We face such variant of MBPP on the basis of its relationship with the bin packing problem, where items are containers and the bins are sections of the ship available for the stowage of hazardous containers. In particular, following a step by step procedure for properly loading all containers on board, we show how the segregation rules derived from the IMDG Code impact on the available slots of the bins. A real life case study is reported.