[huygens6363]

For some reason, ignorance most likely, I'm not impressed. Looks relatively easy. Not for me, but for anybody with some math skills it looks easy to improve upon naive solutions.

To be fair, a completely optimal solution definitely seems out of reach, but I'm not interested in those.

[mcguire]

Hmm. Let's say you're looking at that 5000 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units) ship with (the most common, IIUC) 40' containers. The state space for optimization has something like 2500! or 10^7400 states. Given 24 hours to optimize it at 1ns per state, you could look at 10^14 states or 10^-7384% of the state space.

There are also a lot more constraints than weight and balance and they're constantly changing; some may rule out big chunks of the state space which is very good, but it's still a Hard Problem.

But it's not like there aren't people already doing it.

https://www.herbert-abs.com/cargomax-for-container-ships

https://www.lineroptimizer.com/

[namibj]

The issue is in adequately capturing and encoding these constraints; particularly multi-crane piers that skip an intermediate autonomous shuttle truck to go directly onto trains are quite difficult.

Just imagine the contingency planning due to restrictions in unloading.

[hermitcrab]

Everything is easy to the person that doesn't have to do it.

[saagarjha]

The constraints are not always easily evident, unfortunately.