Queue-constrained packing: A vehicle ferry case study

•A practical method for loading a vehicle ferry to maximise the efficiency of the packing.•Development of a novel two-stage metaheuristic for solving an optimisation problem with stochastic inputs.•We describe two methods for rectangular packing where the choice of which object to pack next is constrained; in this case by what is at the front of the dockside queues.•Results show that the number of dockside queues is critical to obtaining an efficient load on the ferry – if too few queues are used, the packing algorithm is unable to find a good solution.