An agent-based approach to simulate the containership stowage problem

This article presents a graphic simulation tool for the containership stowage problem at maritime ports using an agent-based approach to verify the effect of weight equilibrium stability on the containership. The container stowage problem is developed to guide the planning and procedures to allocate containers into a containership, based on the origin and destination ports previously schedule for each container. A methodological framework was developed to conduct the implementation of the graphic tool, using NetLogo (R) to setup and run the agent-based simulation. To test the graph simulation tool implemented, a total of 12 case studies were created based on combinations of the most influent input parameters with the weight equilibrium stability output variables. The computational results show that the assigned values for the input parameters allocation ordering sequence, number of containers, and stability limits have a direct influence on the weight equilibrium stability simulation during the allocation process.