Coastal Shuttle Tanker Scheduling Model Considering Inventory Cost and System Reliability

Abstract

The near-sea off-shore oil extraction and transportation system use heterogeneous fleets to transfer crude oil from the floating production storage and offloading to the land-based oil storage port. Based on the characteristics of this system, the short sea inventory routing problem is investigated considering the shuttle tanker fleet and inventory management. In order to minimize the total operation cost and maximize the system reliability, a semi-continuous model for the shuttle tanker scheduling problem is established. The model optimizes the tanker scheduling plan and the design of the tanker fleet. To solve the complex model, this article proposes an improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm with differential evolution operator to solve the optimization of the multi-objective model. This research also uses public vessel operation data to test the modeling and optimizing efficiency. The Pareto Fronts associated with the total operation cost and the system reliability from the optimization outcome is analyzed to provide scheduling priority advice. The results indicate that proposed optimization algorithms are effective, and the operation could be optimized with the proposed model and algorithm.

Keywords

• Maritime inventory routing problem
• non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II)
• off-shore oil transportation
• semi-continuous model
• shuttle tanker
• system reliability