Local Search for a Cargo Assembly Planning Problem

Gleb Belov, Natashia Boland, Martin W. P. Savelsbergh, Peter J. Stuckey

Abstract: We consider a real-world cargo assembly planning problem arising in a coal supply chain. The cargoes are built on the stockyard at a port terminal from coal delivered by trains. Then the cargoes are loaded onto vessels. Only a limited number of arriving vessels is known in advance. The goal is to minimize the average delay time of the vessels over a long planning period. We model the problem in the MiniZinc constraint programming language and design a large neighbourhood search scheme. We compare against (an extended version of) a greedy heuristic for the same problem.