Improving the Maritime Transshipment Operations of the Noble Group

Abstract

The Noble Group is a market-leading global supply chain manager of agricultural products, metals and minerals, operating in more than 140 locations. This paper focuses on Noble's maritime operations in Indonesia, where coal is transported from mines to ocean-bound vessels via roads and rivers. Currently, transportation delays are causing Noble to lose tens of millions of dollars per year in demurrage and detention penalties. Additional resources such as barges and floating cranes can be hired in advance to minimize the impact of delays, but their economic benefit is often unclear. In an attempt to reduce or eliminate these delays, we develop a modeling framework and decision support system to facilitate the planning and management of Noble's transshipment operations. The system utilizes fast search algorithms that deliver efficient schedules,

Transportation Asset Acquisition under a Newsvendor Model with Cutting-Stock Restrictions: Approximation and Decomposition Algorithms

“…However, integrating all levels of planning within a single modeling framework will result in a complicated model with several, hard-to-obtain inputs, spanning across different time frames and of different reliability-in addition to challenges related to solution methods and model maintenance. Similar trade-offs can be found in the scheduling of maritime operations, as described by Fragkos and De Reyck (2016). There, vessels arrive at a port randomly, but within a specific time window, and a series of (un)loading operations need to be scheduled for each vessel.…”