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I always thought part of the advantage that shipping containers brought was that they were more or less interchangeable. And that meant that they could be loade

I always thought part of the advantage that shipping containers brought was that they were more or less interchangeable. And that meant that they could be loaded in whatever manner best suited the whole ship. The details of which might not be known at the time when the container was booked. The carrier might be able to reserve “interior” or “top level” spaces for a different prices, but with shipments being loaded/offloaded at different ports, the logistics of loading can be quite complicated. If your container need to be offloaded at the first of three ports, you probably couldn’t have the option of an interior space. Or if you had an extremely heavy container, that should be loaded in the lower part of the ship for safety. My guess is that the orchestration of how containers are loaded is complex enough that the order of stacking is best left up to the shipper and adding cost/location optimization to the equation might make things too complicated. The containers should be loaded in the manner that is the safest and most efficient for unloading.

Raidion 6y ago
I'm sure it's just a level of optimization that's hard to solve because of a few reasons. a) it's a fairly hard technology problem. Large container ships can carry 20k containers. If each of those has a spot, and you have to optimize, the search space is suddenly looking like 20,000!, which is just a wildly big number. So assuming you have some sort of technological solution and know where every container should go, b) you need to move all the logistics around so that containers arrive in the correct order to get loaded in the correct spots. You need to do all this just to massively increase the complexity of your billing model to offer slightly different rates of insurance. I'm sure there are teams looking at ways to make this better (just stipulate in the contract that any super valuable containers arrive early so they're loaded lower), but this is a HARD problem to solve completely.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  I'm not an expert on ocean shipping by any means, but I would assume that cargo value is such a low priority when it comes to determine loading strategies that you would only need to optimize around a local area of maybe 100 containers. Which would not make it a hard problem at all but it could be pretty pointless depending on how many containers go overboard in a typical "lost container" event. Also, consider that from the point of view of the people loading the ship, it's all insured. And if you didn't get the insurance then you understand the risk. Why would they care? They aren't the insurance company. What's their incentive?
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  This is such a HN thread.. The same effort is better invested into making sure you are not losing containers. It's like saying 'we can optimise policing so that stabbings only happen to the right people'
  - GauntletWizard 6y ago
    Do you think that doesn’t happen? Police departments absolutely prioritize certain areas over others - Places where crime is unlikely to happen but should be dealt with swiftly, places where crime is very likely to happen and they have resources on-hand. The net losers tend to be “The Average Person”, for whom police response times in event of a burglary or domestic incident is measured in tens and fifteens of minutes rather than fives. Even “Even spread” would be a serious topic of debate - Even spread over what? Geographic area? Residency? Where people are likely to be at a given time? Those are three radically different answers in any commuter city.
- eru 6y ago
  A big search space is not a detriment to optimization. It just keeps you from reaching provable optimality, but doesn't keep you from saving on costs compared to doing nothing. Same for the rest of what you describe: yes, a perfect system would be a lot of hassle, but making any effort at all is sure to yield benefits. You don't need to change the billing model necessarily. The customers don't have to know that you are doing this kind of optimization. Of course, the more you can expose incentives to your customers, the more efficient you can get. But even if your containers arrive in arbitrary order and you have to make your decisions on where to place them 'online', ie before the next container arrives; as long as you have any choice left at all, you can try your hand at optimization techniques.
gumby 6y ago
> Or if you had an extremely heavy container, that should be loaded in the lower part of the ship for safety. By the way the standard ISO 668 intermodal container has a total limit of about three tonnes; the unusual, heaviest size is about ten tonnes. A container port won’t be prepared to handle anything heavier or even, in practice, the 10 tonne version. These constraints apply to the rest of the system (roads, trucks etc — they are “intermodal” after all) so anything outside these constraints (wind turbine planes, major ship engine blocks etc) isn’t containerized anyway. In other words the point of containerization is to be able to ignore these distinctions. If you care, you ship as if it weren’t in a container
- eru 6y ago
  Oh, just because you can ignore some distinctions doesn't mean that you will. If a shipping operator can eke out a few extra percent of efficiency by taking container weight into account, they will try to do so. Of course, they will have to balance the efficiency gains against extra complexity. But it's not so different from eg Amazon taking what's going on inside the AWS VMs into account when deciding on how to run their data centre. Eg you might have booked a VM with four cores, but if you are typically only using one, they'll take that into account during placement.
- dmurray 6y ago
  3 tons is tiny. An empty shipping container weighs at least 2 tons. The actual ISO 668 limit seems to be 30 tons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

Raidion 6y ago

I'm sure it's just a level of optimization that's hard to solve because of a few reasons. a) it's a fairly hard technology problem. Large container ships can carry 20k containers. If each of those has a spot, and you have to optimize, the search space is suddenly looking like 20,000!, which is just a wildly big number. So assuming you have some sort of technological solution and know where every container should go, b) you need to move all the logistics around so that containers arrive in the correct order to get loaded in the correct spots. You need to do all this just to massively increase the complexity of your billing model to offer slightly different rates of insurance. I'm sure there are teams looking at ways to make this better (just stipulate in the contract that any super valuable containers arrive early so they're loaded lower), but this is a HARD problem to solve completely.

OldHand2018 6y ago
I'm not an expert on ocean shipping by any means, but I would assume that cargo value is such a low priority when it comes to determine loading strategies that you would only need to optimize around a local area of maybe 100 containers. Which would not make it a hard problem at all but it could be pretty pointless depending on how many containers go overboard in a typical "lost container" event. Also, consider that from the point of view of the people loading the ship, it's all insured. And if you didn't get the insurance then you understand the risk. Why would they care? They aren't the insurance company. What's their incentive?
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
This is such a HN thread.. The same effort is better invested into making sure you are not losing containers. It's like saying 'we can optimise policing so that stabbings only happen to the right people'
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  Do you think that doesn’t happen? Police departments absolutely prioritize certain areas over others - Places where crime is unlikely to happen but should be dealt with swiftly, places where crime is very likely to happen and they have resources on-hand. The net losers tend to be “The Average Person”, for whom police response times in event of a burglary or domestic incident is measured in tens and fifteens of minutes rather than fives. Even “Even spread” would be a serious topic of debate - Even spread over what? Geographic area? Residency? Where people are likely to be at a given time? Those are three radically different answers in any commuter city.
eru 6y ago
A big search space is not a detriment to optimization. It just keeps you from reaching provable optimality, but doesn't keep you from saving on costs compared to doing nothing. Same for the rest of what you describe: yes, a perfect system would be a lot of hassle, but making any effort at all is sure to yield benefits. You don't need to change the billing model necessarily. The customers don't have to know that you are doing this kind of optimization. Of course, the more you can expose incentives to your customers, the more efficient you can get. But even if your containers arrive in arbitrary order and you have to make your decisions on where to place them 'online', ie before the next container arrives; as long as you have any choice left at all, you can try your hand at optimization techniques.

gumby 6y ago

> Or if you had an extremely heavy container, that should be loaded in the lower part of the ship for safety. By the way the standard ISO 668 intermodal container has a total limit of about three tonnes; the unusual, heaviest size is about ten tonnes. A container port won’t be prepared to handle anything heavier or even, in practice, the 10 tonne version. These constraints apply to the rest of the system (roads, trucks etc — they are “intermodal” after all) so anything outside these constraints (wind turbine planes, major ship engine blocks etc) isn’t containerized anyway. In other words the point of containerization is to be able to ignore these distinctions. If you care, you ship as if it weren’t in a container

eru 6y ago
Oh, just because you can ignore some distinctions doesn't mean that you will. If a shipping operator can eke out a few extra percent of efficiency by taking container weight into account, they will try to do so. Of course, they will have to balance the efficiency gains against extra complexity. But it's not so different from eg Amazon taking what's going on inside the AWS VMs into account when deciding on how to run their data centre. Eg you might have booked a VM with four cores, but if you are typically only using one, they'll take that into account during placement.
dmurray 6y ago
3 tons is tiny. An empty shipping container weighs at least 2 tons. The actual ISO 668 limit seems to be 30 tons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container