A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels

• Published in: The Journal of the Operational Research Society 2016-01, Vol.67 (1), p.148-158
• Main Authors: Seixas, Michel Povlovitsch, Mendes, André Bergsten, Pereira Barretto, Marcos Ribeiro, da Cunha, Claudio Barbieri, Brinati, Marco Antonio, Cruz, Roberto Edward, Wu, Yue, Wilson, Philip A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: allocation; Business and Management; cutting stock problem; distribution; General Paper; General Papers; Heuristic; heuristics; Knapsack problem; Linear programming; Literature reviews; Logistics; Management; Mathematical models; Mathematical programming; Operations research; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Petroleum industry; Planning; sea transport; Studies
• ISSN: 0160-5682; 1476-9360
• DOI: 10.1057/jors.2015.62

This paper addresses a practical problem encountered in the oil industry, related to the supplying of general cargo to offshore rigs and production units. For a given route assigned to a supply vessel we seek to determine the optimal two-dimensional positioning of deck cargoes such that the overall profit is maximized, while ensuring that several safety and operational constraints are respected. In terms of mathematical modelling, the resulting problem can be seen as a rich variation of the two-dimensional knapsack problem, since some cargoes may wait for a later trip. Furthermore, given that the trip may serve many offshore units and that a substantial number of items must also return from these units, the problem becomes even more complex and can be viewed as a pickup and delivery allocation problem. We propose a probabilistic constructive procedure combined with a local search heuristic to solve this problem. We also report the results of computational experiments with randomly generated instances. These results evidence that our proposed heuristic can effectively help ship planners when dealing with such large-scale allocation problems, with many operational constraints.