ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION APPROACH FOR CONTAINER LOADING PROBLEMS

The importance of reducing the cost of container shipping as well as related transportation cost is gradually increasing with the internationalization of supply chains. There is no doubt that one of the potential ways of reducing these costs is the better utilization from the container volumes. Therefore, NP-hard container loading problems attracts the attention of many researchers. In this study, two algorithms for the container loading problems based on ant colony optimization are suggested. Having determined the parameters with the factorial design, the performance of the proposed algorithms is tested with the standard test cases in the literature and the results are discussed comparatively with reference to the other works in the literature.