Mathematical models, exact and heuristic solution methods of ship routing and scheduling in the oil industry

Abstract

This research project aims to develop mathematical models and propose effective methods to solve the vessel routing and scheduling problems in the oil industry. This research is motivated by a case study in a Brazilian oil company, which produce crude oil in offshore platforms (oil rigs) and transports it to coastal terminals. This problem can be represented as a pickup and delivery problem with time windows and several specific constraints in this context. In addition to splitting pickup and delivery, multiple depots and heterogeneous fleet, some examples of specific constraints include flexible vessel draft, mooring restrictions, dynamic positioning of the vessels and platforms, berth constraints, incompatible products in the same vessel compartment, among others. The goal is to propose different methods to solve this particular problem, such as branch-and-cut, branch-and-price, branch-cut-and-price, heuristics and hybrid methods. Computacional experiments will be performed using problem instances available in the literature and based on real data sets provided by the oil company. (AU)