Real-Time Offshore Supply Vessel Routing Problem with Random Service Requests

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.