Tank allocation problems in maritime bulk shipping

In real world maritime routing problems, many restrictions and regulations influence the daily operations. The effects of several of these restrictions have not yet been studied in depth from an operations research perspective. This paper introduces the problem of allocating bulk cargoes to tanks in maritime shipping. A model and several variations are presented, and it is shown that the main problem consists of a number of complicating constraints. The problem studied is crucial when determining whether a given route is feasible for a given ship, and computational experiments are performed to assess the difficulty of solving realistically sized instances. The proposed formulation is hoped to provide a suitable starting point for research on stowage problems in maritime bulk shipping.