Abstract

This paper focuses on a new variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Synchronization constraints (VRPTWSyn), inspired by a routing problem faced by the oil & gas industry. Here, a heterogeneous fleet of Anchor Handling Tug Supply vessels (AHTS) must be assigned to perform tasks at offshore platforms, and most tasks require the simultaneous action of more than two tugs. Instances are proposed, as well as a greedy randomized heuristic that generates feasible solutions to the problem. As shown by the computational experiments reported here, although the complexity of the AHTS-routing problem is higher than the VRPTWSyn, the proposed method could produce a diverse set of feasible solutions, which in the future may be improved by a meta-heuristic-based algorithm.

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