  Container shipping drives the global economy and is an eco-friendly mode of
transportation. A key objective is to maximize the utilization of vessels,
which is challenging due to the NP-hardness of stowage planning. This article
surveys the literature on the Container Stowage Planning Problem (CSPP). We
introduce a classification scheme to analyze single-port and multi-port CSPPs,
as well as the hierarchical decomposition of CSPPs into the master and slot
planning problem. Our survey shows that the area has a relatively small number
of publications and that it is hard to evaluate the industrial applicability of
many of the proposed solution methods due to the oversimplification of problem
formulations. To address this issue, we propose a research agenda with
directions for future work, including establishing a representative problem
definition and providing new benchmark instances where needed.
