A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels
研究石油工业中向海上平台供应普通货物的装载问题，提出一种结合概率构造和局部搜索的启发式方法，在满足安全和操作约束下最大化利润，对船运规划者有用。
This paper addresses a practical problem encountered in the oil industry, related to the supplying of general cargo to offshore rigs and production units. For a given route assigned to a supply vessel we seek to determine the optimal two-dimensional positioning of deck cargoes such that the overall profit is maximized, while ensuring that several safety and operational constraints are respected. In terms of mathematical modelling, the resulting problem can be seen as a rich variation of the two-dimensional knapsack problem, since some cargoes may wait for a later trip. Furthermore, given that the trip may serve many offshore units and that a substantial number of items must also return from these units, the problem becomes even more complex and can be viewed as a pickup and delivery allocation problem. We propose a probabilistic constructive procedure combined with a local search heuristic to solve this problem. We also report the results of computational experiments with randomly generated instances. These results evidence that our proposed heuristic can effectively help ship planners when dealing with such large-scale allocation problems, with many operational constraints.