¹University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Correspondence: TN Wong, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Haking Wong Building, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. E-mail: tnwong@hkucc.hku.hk

Received July 2004; Accepted September 2005; Published online 28 December 2005.

Abstract

A model is proposed to generate solutions for container selection, for the allocation of cargo to containers, and for cargo orientation within a container. The model is in the form of a mixed integer program with the objective of minimizing the total shipping cost. The practical requirements of loading priority and weight distribution along the main dimension of the container are incorporated into the model. A heuristic solution strategy is proposed and used to control the computation time by pre-setting the search increments. Three case examples are presented. The first and third examples show that the proposed model can produce a better solution than the manual schedulers. The second example is taken from the literature and is compared with the solution generated by the proposed model, demonstrating that the practical considerations incorporated into the model do not necessarily lead to increased shipping costs.