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In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve a practical ship scheduling problem for international crude oil transportation. The problem is considered as a vehicle routing problem with split deliveries. The objective of this paper is to find an optimal assignment of tankers, a sequence of visiting and loading volume simultaneously in order to minimize the total distance satisfying the capacity of tankers. A savings-based meta-heuristic algorithm with lot sizing parameters and volume assignment heuristic is developed. The proposed method is applied to solve a case study with real data. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm compared with that of human operators.

The pickup and delivery crude oil transportation scheduling problem is to find an optimal assignment of requests to a fleet of tankers, sequence of visiting places, and loading and unloading volume of demand simultaneously in order to minimize the total cost with the capacity of the tankers. The problem can be formulated as a split pickup and delivery vehicle routing problem. We apply a column generation algorithm to solve the problem efficiently. In order to obtain a feasible solution by column generation, we propose an effective algorithm to generate a feasible solution satisfying the set partitioning constraints. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.