An experimental comparison of different metaheuristics for the Master Bay Plan Problem

Different heuristics for the problem of determining stowage plans for containerships, that is the so called Master Bay Plan Problem (MBPP), are compared. The first approach is a tabu search (TS) heuristic and it has been recently presented in literature. Two new solution procedures are proposed in this paper: a fast simple constructive loading heuristic (LH) and an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. An extensive computational experimentation performed on both random and real size instances is reported and conclusions on the appropriateness of the tested approaches for the MBPP are drawn.