Routing and scheduling of platform supply vessels in offshore oil and gas logistics

Abstract

In this work, we focus on an operational logistics problem that arises in the offshore oil and gas exploration and production industry. In particular, we aim to design cost-effective routes and schedules for platform supply vessels, which are routinely employed to deliver necessary supplies to the platforms as well as to collect from those platforms used materials that need to be transported back to the onshore base for maintenance, reuse, or discarding. To address the rich-featured routing problem that arises in this offshore logistics application, we introduce a novel mixed-integer linear programming formulation and propose a specialized branch-and-cut algorithm to solve such a model. Furthermore, in order to evaluate our proposed algorithm’s performance, we conduct an extensive computational study using representative benchmark instances inspired by real operational data. The computational results show that our algorithm solved the majority of those instances to optimality, demonstrating its potential for practical use in offshore oil and gas logistics operations.