Abstract
With environmental issues getting more concerns these days, shipping industries feel obliged to reduce fuel consumption, which at the same time reduce their operational costs with the help of bunkering policy. With bunkering policy embedded in the model, a class of vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery is studied in this paper. A more realistic fuel consumption model is first proposed that not only the cruising speed but also the weight of ships contribute to the fuel consumption rates. A mixed integer programming model is then formulated, deciding routing, scheduling, cruising speed, service quantities and bunkering policy in an integrated manner. An efficient heuristic algorithm is developed to tackle the large scale problems in real practice through exploring and exploiting the idea of “Most Promising Area”. The performance of the algorithm and the benefits of the integrated decision making platform are demonstrated using numerical examples.
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