Feedstock Routing in the ExxonMobil Downstream Sector

Abstract

ExxonMobil annually transports significant volumes of vacuum gas oil (VGO) from supply points in Europe to refineries in the United States. Optimizing these transportation costs by using modern mathematical programming technology can provide significant cost savings. We developed a mixed-integer programming formulation for VGO routing and inventory management, and we integrated it into a decision support tool to enable experienced traders and schedulers to further improve the performance of ExxonMobil's downstream supply chain.

Discrete time and continuous time formulations for a short sea inventory routing problem

“…These problems are often called Maritime Inventory Routing Problems (MIRPs). Most of the published MIRP contributions are based on real cases from the industry, see for the single product case [7,9,18,16,17,20,29] and for the multiple products case [5,11,24,25,27,28].…”

“…These event based models are known as time continuous models [13]. In [1,17,19,20,24,25], and [28] time discrete models are developed to capture the complicating factors with varying production and consumption rates.…”

Combined ship routing and inventory management in the salmon farming industry

“…For single product MIRP studies, see for instance Agra et al [2], Engineer et al [14], Furman et al [15], Goel et al [16], Grønhaug et al [17], Hewitt et al [18], Rocha et al [23], Shen et al [25], Sherali and Al-Yakoob [26], [27], Song and Furman [30], and Uggen et al [32]. We will assume constant and fixed production and consumption rates during the planning horizon.…”

Solving the vehicle routing problem with lunch break arising in the furniture delivery industry

“…This pause scheduling problem 10 arises, e.g., in retail delivery, parcel and mail delivery, waste collection, and home blood sampling collection [5,17,24]. In the VRPLB, drivers must make a pause during their shift to respect the law, union rules, and/or company regulations.…”

“…Among them, the food and soft-drink industries are the most prominent [16,21,27,28]. Other applications arise in different industries, including lubricating oil distribution [23,29], waste collection [5,17], industrial gases [9,10], petroleum products [3,6], and cash [30]. However, even if these articles deal with real applications, drivers pauses were not 10 considered in an exact and extensive fashion.…”