Grasp for the slot planning problem

In this paper, we address the slot planning phase, in which the containers assigned to a container ship location have to be stowed, satisfying many conditions related to the way in which containers have to be stacked, the weight distribution and the specific conditions regulating the containers with dangerous products. In order to solve in an efficient way problems of realistic size, we have developed a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) algorithm, including two constructive methods, several randomization strategies, and several improvement moves. The algorithms have been tested on a set of real-world instances. The results show that the algorithm works quite well for a wide range of real instances.