Multi-port stowage planning
4 hrs → 30 min
Planners get 2–4 hours per port to allocate cargo manually — and almost no time left to optimise. SONATA produces the plan in under 30 minutes, so the time goes back into refinement.
Anonymised customer profile
Industry
Feeder Operator
Region
Asia-Pacific
Fleet / scale
Hub-and-spoke network · 30+ ports
The challenge
Vessel planners get the cargo list 24 hours before arrival and owe the terminal a plan 8 hours before operations. That leaves 2 to 4 hours of manual allocation — and almost no time left to optimise.
- Allocating containers into charted bays manually, then re-adjusting for reefers, DG cargo and special containers, consumed the entire planning window.
- Three-port rotations required balancing cargo weight, stability, lashing limits and port sequence by hand.
- Plans that looked optimal on paper degraded in practice when real cargo deviated from forecast — and there was no time to re-plan.
The approach
Replaced manual planning with SONATA's optimisation engine — predictive analytics, ML, and high-level algorithms producing a complete plan in under 30 minutes.
- Generates the full stowage plan in under 30 minutes, so the 2–4 hours go back into refinement and stress-testing.
- Real-time stability, strength and lashing calculations baked into the planning logic.
- Automated IMDG dangerous-cargo segregation as a hard constraint.
- Multi-port planning and round-voyage analysis on one model — no opaque manual iterations.
The results
2–4 hrs → 30 min
Time to a complete stowage plan
IMDG hard
Dangerous-cargo segregation enforced automatically
Multi-port
Round-voyage analysis on one model
Lower
Operating costs · port dwell time · restow
Deployment
Live in 8 weeks
ROI
Operational from day one
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