BAPLIE

2026-09-05 #Shipping #Formats

About the text files that tell container ships where every box sits.

Still being written.

I have a friend who works as a sailor. He is gone for months, then he turns up with stories: horror, comedy, and, every so often, something technically fascinating. This time it was BAPLIE, an open standard, structured plaintext for a container ship’s bay plan.

The official name is the whole sentence: Bayplan/stowage plan occupied and empty locations. One file is one vessel, one voyage, one port of call.

Three axes — vessel, voyage, port of call — meeting at one BAPLIE file — Departure at this port is the arrival plan for the next one.

The Ship Message Design Group has kept the guidelines since the early nineties.

As with many great things — COBOL still paying the banks — the 1995 v2.2 is deprecated and still what terminals speak.

The whole ship is a three-number address. 0020204 is bay 02, row 02, starboard, tier 04 in the hold.

0020204 decoded into bay on the plan and row and tier on the section — Bay along the ship, row across it, tier up it. Even rows are starboard, odd rows port, `00` is the centerline.

A 40-foot container filed under even bay 002, spanning odd bays 001 and 003 — A 40′ box is filed under the even bay it covers, not under either odd 20′ bay.

Midship section: hold tiers 02–06 under the hatch, deck tiers 82–86 above it — Deck tiers start again at 80, so the number itself says whether the box is under the hatch or on top of it.

The files below describe a made-up feeder, MV Kinda Neat. The first is after Rotterdam, sixteen boxes on board; the second is the same ship after Hamburg. The little hull is the ship; the grid is the cut. Click a box to see the segments that put it there.

snapshot

looking forward · port left, starboard right

The same bay after Rotterdam and after Hamburg, with discharged and loaded cells marked — A port call rewrites the photograph. Dashed cells left; the heavy one came on.

LOC+147+0020204::5' with the three EDIFACT delimiters marked — `+` splits fields, `:` splits a field, `'` ends a segment. An empty component is still a component: `::` is one that was skipped.

A 24,000 TEU ship is the same idea, just a lot more apostrophes.

More interesting stuff:

“Including empties” means empty containers. They still occupy a slot and they still have a tare weight. Empty locations can be sent; SMDG 2.2 says not to.
Reefers carry a TMP segment. Dangerous goods get a DGS. Everyone else is just a number, a weight, and two ports.

The sibling message is MOVINS: put this box here. BAPLIE is the photograph after you did.

MOVINS as load and discharge arrows on a bay; BAPLIE as the occupied slots after the moves — Same hull. One file is an instruction; the other is what is actually on board.