A Vessel Pickup and Delivery Problem from the Disruption Management in Offshore Supply Vessel Operations

Abstract

Abstract. This paper considers a vessel pickup and delivery problem that arises in the case of disruptions in the supply vessel logistics in the offshore oil and gas industry. The problem can be modelled as a multivehicle pickup and delivery problem where delivery orders are transported by supply vessels from an onshore supply base (depot) to a set of offshore oil and gas installations, while pickup orders are to be transported from the installations back to the supply base (i.e. backload). We present both an arc-flow and a path-flow formulation for the problem. For the path-flow formulation we also propose an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for generating the paths, which represent feasible vessel voyages. It is shown through a computational study on various realistic test instances provided by a major oil and gas company that the path-flow model is superior with respect to computational performance.

A variable neighbourhood search heuristic for disruption management in offshore oil and gas logistics

“…First, the test instances are described in Section 5.1, before testing the effect of the most important parameter used in the heuristic in Section 5.2. Finally, we compare the performance of the heuristic with the results obtained by Albjerk et al [1] in Section 5.3. The VNS heuristic is implemented in Java, and tested on a computer running Windows 7 with an Intel i7-3770 3.40 GHz CPU and 16 GB of RAM.…”

“…In addition to Albjerk et al [1], who are studying the same problem as in this paper, there are also several other papers in the literature addressing related ship routing and logistics problems from the upstream supply chain for offshore petroleum production. Gribkovskaia et al [8] study a pickup and delivery problem where offshore oil and gas platforms in the Norwegian Sea are serviced by a single OSV.…”

“…Relatively few studies regarding disruption management in maritime transportation are encountered, and to the authors' knowledge Albjerk et al [1] is the only paper addressing disruption management in offshore supply logistics. Brouer et al [5] consider the vessel schedule recovery problem in container liner shipping.…”

“…• The 2-opt move takes two nodes from a voyage, removes the arc leaving each node, reconnects the graph, and switches the direction of visit of the intermediate nodes. In Figure 2a), the arcs (1,2) and (4,5) are deleted and replaced with (1,4) and (2,5). Note that the direction of visits for nodes 2 through 4 is reversed.…”

“…The only previously published paper studying this problem is Albjerk et al [1], who propose an arc-flow and a path-flow formulation of the problem, together with a method for generating paths. However, these exact solution methods are incapable of solving sufficiently large instances to be of practical use for Statoil.…”