A maritime inventory routing problem with stochastic sailing and port times

Abstract

We consider a stochastic short sea shipping problem where a company is responsible for both the distribution of oil products between islands and the inventory management of those products at unloading ports. Ship routing and scheduling is associated to uncertainty in weather conditions and unpredictable waiting times in ports, and in this work, both sailing times and port times are considered to be stochastic parameters.A two-stage stochastic programming model with recourse is presented where the first-stage consists of routing, loading and unloading decisions, and the second stage consists of scheduling decisions. The model is solved using a decomposition approach similar to an L-shaped algorithm where optimality cuts are added dynamically, and this solution process is embedded within the sample average approximation method. A computational study based on ten real-world instances is presented.

Robust Optimization for a Maritime Inventory Routing Problem

“…Christiansen and Nygreen [28] used soft inventory levels to handle uncertainties in sailing time and time in port, and these levels were transformed into soft time windows for a single product MIRP. Agra et al [6] were the rst to use stochastic programming to model uncertain sailing and port times for a MIRP with several products and inventory management at the consumption ports only. Recently, a heuristic stochastic approach is presented in Agra et al [9] to be able solve larger instances of the MIRP.…”

“…Equations (5) x y im to 1 for the mandatory visits. Constraints (6) state that if port i is visited m times, then it must also have been visited m − 1 times. Constraints (7)- (9) dene the variables as binary.…”

Industrial ship routing problem with split delivery and two types of vessels

“…Despite this history, relatively limited work has been performed on the ship routing problem (SRP) from the perspective of operations research/management science (OR/MS) compared with the considerable research on vehicle routing problem (VRP). However, maritime transportation optimization has steadily drawn increasing attention over the last decades Agra et al, 2015). Lawrence (1972) classified ocean transportation types into three groups according to operation modes, namely, industrial, tramp, and liner.…”

The New Generation of Operations Research Methods in Supply Chain Optimization: A Review

“…Two of these studies aimed at enhancing the demand coverage by the maximization of the collected rewards from the visited demand nodes [73,75]. The minimum missed order is achieved in the proposed model by Singh et al [72], while another relevant study by Agra et al [77] focused on the optimization of backlogged demands to improve the service level. In another example of responsive service design, Chow and Nurumbetova [76] aimed at minimizing delays in a multi-objective basis.…”