A Placement Heuristic for a Commercial Decision Support System for Container Vessel Stowage

Decision support systems have become a viable approach to tackle
complex optimization problems. The combination of experts' know-how
and efficient optimization algorithms can dramatically improve
solution quality and reduce work time. Some of these systems rely on
continuous interaction with their users and almost all require
fast feedback from the optimization algorithms. We propose a placement
heuristic that serves as the optimization component of a decision
support system to interactively generate container vessel stowage
plans, a complex problem with high economical impact within the
shipping industry. Our experimental evaluation shows that the
placement heuristic is fast enough for interactive optimization and
produces solutions that are competitive with expert users.