Real-Time Offshore Supply Vessel Routing Problem with Random Service Requests
Sidney Augusto Kovalski
Department of Naval, Ocean and Coastal Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Avenida Athos da Silveira Ramos 149, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 21941611, Brazil.
Raad Yahya Qassim
Department of Naval and Ocean Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Avenida Athos da Silveira Ramos 149, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 21941611, Brazil.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The routing of supply vessels to offshore platforms is one of the major tasks in upstream logistics planning in the oil and gas industry. This task involves the formulation and solution of a real-time variant of the stochastic dynamic vehicle routing problem, which reflects the operational environment of offshore platforms in practice. In this paper, a novel mixed integer linear programming-based heuristic is presented with a view to determining the optimal route of a single supply vessel allocated to provide service to a group of offshore platforms through the supply of spare parts, liquid bulk liquids, and other materials, allowing for random service requests by the offshore platform group. The proposed heuristic is applied to a real-world case study of vessel routing to offshore platforms in the South Atlantic Ocean Shelf. The computational performance of the heuristic, as assessed by the degree of dynamism, is found to be very good.
Keywords: Supply vessel routing, offshore platforms, random service requests, mixed integer linear programming heuristic, degree of dynamism, oil and gas industry