Routing of supply vessels to petroleum installations

Abstract

PurposeIn the Norwegian oil and gas industry the upstream logistics includes providing the offshore installations with needed supplies and return flow of used materials and equipment. This paper considers a real‐life routing problem for supply vessels serving offshore installations at Haltenbanken off the northwest coast of Norway from its onshore supply base. The purpose of the paper is to explore how the offshore installation's limited storage capacity affects the routing of the supply vessels aiming towards creating efficient routes.Design/methodology/approachA simplified version of the real‐life routing problem for one supply vessel is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model that contains constraints reflecting the storage requirements problem. These constraints ensure that there is enough capacity at the platform decks and that it is possible to perform both pickup and delivery services.FindingsThe model has been tested on real‐life‐sized instances based on data provided by the Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA. The tests show that in order to obtain optimal solutions to the pickup and delivery problem with limited free storage capacities at installations, one has to include in the formulation the new sets of constraints, the storage feasibility and the service feasibility requirements. In addition, two visits to some platforms are necessary to obtain optimality.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation is the present inability to solve large cases.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper is to provide a better insight into a real‐life routing problem which has a unique feature arising from the limited deck capacity at the offshore installations that complicates the performance of service. This feature has neither been discussed nor modeled in the vehicle routing literature before, hence the formulation of the problem is original and reveals some interesting results.

A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels

“…The authors analysed the influence of suspending operations at the offshore installations during the night and considered the total slackness found in each solution as a way of evaluating its robustness. Aas et al (2007) treated the supply problem as a pick-up and delivery problem, given that a substantial part of what is delivered to the installations must be sent back to the supply base. Instead of defining optimal routes for the entire fleet, the authors proposed a mathematical model based on integer linear programming for defining the optimal route for a single vessel, considering a set of installations to be visited for which the pick-up and delivery demands were known.…”

“…Differently from the articles devoted to the planning of supply operations in the offshore industry (eg, Fagerholt and Lindstad, 2000;Aas et al, 2007;Gribkovskaia et al, 2008;Halvorsen-Weare et al, 2012) where each cargo is specified by its area, our problem considers each cargo's individual dimensions (length and width), given that we are solving a twodimensional packing problem (Wäscher et al, 2007) where cargoes must be selected and positioned on the deck of a supply vessel. The problem studied herein arises in the context of Brazilian state oil company Petrobras.…”

Innovations in the brazilian offshore support vessel chain: a content analysis approach

“…In the offshore support vessel industry, significant effort is focused on techniques involving the modelling and implementation of sophisticated algorithms for vessel routing (CUESTA et al, 2017;KAISER, 2015;AAS et al, 2007), fleet capacity, and configuration (AAS; HALSKAU-SR; WALLACE, 2009). Business-process management ideas can contribute to innovation in offshore service vessels (BORCH; BATALDEN, 2014) and signal that to overcome complexity and volatility innovation in business process management is crucial.…”

“…The logistics activities that connect oil and gas to the end customers are called downstream logistics (AAS et al, 2007 BORCH;BATALDEN, 2014). In this business the usage of these terms are interchangeable.…”

Multi-ACO Application in Routing and Scheduling Optimization of Maintenance Fleet (RSOMF) Based on Conditions for Offshore Wind Farms

“…In the offshore oil and gas industry, a set of installations regularly requires supplies from an onshore supply depot and returns used material/equipment. Aas et al [16] explore such a routing problem and provide a mathematical formulation of this routing problem as a mixed integer programming model. Gribkovskaia et al [17] continue the previous work and develop several construction heuristics, as well as a tabu search algorithm for the routing problem.…”