AI2STOW: End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning to Construct Master Stowage Plans under Demand Uncertainty
This addresses operational efficiency for liner shipping companies, but it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition approaches with a new method.
The paper tackles the stowage planning problem in container shipping by proposing AI2STOW, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning model that creates master plans under demand uncertainty, and it outperforms baseline methods in objective performance and computational efficiency on simulated realistic instances.
The worldwide economy and environmental sustainability depend on eff icient and reliable supply chains, in which container shipping plays a crucial role as an environmentally friendly mode of transport. Liner shipping companies seek to improve operational efficiency by solving the stowage planning problem. Due to many complex combinatorial aspects, stowage planning is challenging and often decomposed into two NP-hard subproblems: master and slot planning. This article proposes AI2STOW, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning model with feasibility projection and an action mask to create master plans under demand uncertainty with global objectives and constraints, including paired block stowage patterms. Our experimental results demonstrate that AI2STOW outperforms baseline methods from reinforcement learning and stochastic programming in objective performance and computational efficiency, based on simulated instances reflecting the scale of realistic vessels and operational planning horizons.