Ship Routing with Pickup and Delivery for a Maritime Oil Transportation System: MIP Model and Heuristics

Abstract

This paper examines a ship routing problem with pickup and delivery and time windows for maritime oil transportation, motivated by the production and logistics activities of an oil company operating in the Brazilian coast. The transportation costs from offshore platforms to coastal terminals are an important issue in the search for operational excellence in the oil industry, involving operations that demand agile and effective decision support systems. This paper presents an optimization approach to address this problem, based on a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a novel and exploratory application of two tailor-made MIP heuristics, based on relax-and-fix and time decomposition procedures. The model minimizes fuel costs of a heterogeneous fleet of oil tankers and costs related to freighting contracts. The model also considers company-specific constraints for offshore oil transportation. Computational experiments based on the mathematical models and the related MIP heuristics are presented for a set of real data provided by the company, which confirm the potential of optimization-based methods to find good solutions for problems of moderate sizes.

Optimizing multiship routing and scheduling with constraints on inventory levels in a Brazilian oil company

“…Rodrigues et al. () studied a maritime routing and scheduling problem of oil cabotage ships between offshore platforms and coastal terminals, also motivated by the actual operation of an oil company operating on the Brazilian coast. Unlike the present multiship routing and scheduling problem with constraints on inventory levels, the problem was formulated as a PDPTW with known quantities to be collected from each platform and delivered to each terminal within time windows, which minimizes costs of fuel consumption of ships and freighting contracts.…”

“…These due dates are predetermined using a simple procedure described in Rodrigues et al. (); each corresponds to the end of the time window of terminal j in request ( i, j, p, k ). In this procedure, time windows for the platform and terminal of each request are calculated based on the platform storage capacity, platform production rate, and load quantity of the request previously computed.…”

O problema de coleta e entrega com janelas de tempo na indústria petrolífera: modelos e métodos branch-and-cut

“…Furthermore, a vessel cannot moor on certain platforms or terminals, due to physical issues such as the draft (which is the submerged part of a vessel) and LOA (length overall). Further information about the physical characteristics of the vessels considered in this study can be found in Rodrigues et al (2016).…”

“…More details about this function can be obtained in Rodrigues et al (2016). Constraints (2) ensure that exactly one arc leaves from node i and constraints (3) guarantee that there is exactly one arc that enters j; both ensure that each node is visited exactly once.…”

Abordagens de otimização para um problema de roteirização e programação de navios petroleiros

“…A relax-and-fix heuristic is also explored using the GAMS/CPLEX optimization package, with a view to capturing business requirements and specific aspect of the company's operations. Although there are other related works in the literature along this strand of research, authors are not aware of other studies exploring optimization models and solution methods addressing this pickup and delivery problem with all its particular operating features, except for our other work in Rodrigues (2016) that also proposed a time decomposition heuristic procedure for this problem. These studies were conducted in strong collaboration with a Brazilian oil company, so that the problem could be well defined both in the terms of market characteristics and validity of practical operations.…”