Routing and scheduling of RoRo ships with stowage constraints

Roll-on/Roll-off ships are used for international transport of vehicles and other rolling equipment. We consider the problem where a ship sails between two geographical regions, picking up cargo in the first and making deliveries to the second. Several variations are considered with optional cargoes, flexible cargo quantities, and ship stability restrictions. Decisions must be made regarding the route and schedule of the ship as well as the stowage of cargo onboard. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer program, which has been solved using Xpress. In addition, a tailor made heuristic procedure is built using components from tabu search and squeaky wheel optimization. Extensive computational results are presented, showing that the heuristic is able to handle realistically sized problem instances.

Research highlights
► A mixed integer programming model is presented for a problem combining routing and scheduling decisions and stowage decisions for a RoRo ship.
► A commercial MIP solver can only solve small instances of the combined problem.
► A heuristic solution method based on tabu search and squeaky wheel optimization is shown to handle realistic instances of the problem.