Routing and scheduling in a liquefied natural gas shipping problem with inventory and berth constraints

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been transformed to liquid form for the purpose of transportation, which is mainly done by specially built LNG vessels travelling from the production site to the consumers. We describe a real-life ship routing and scheduling problem from the LNG bu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of operations research 2013-03, Vol.203 (1), p.167-186
Main Authors: Halvorsen-Weare, Elin E., Fagerholt, Kjetil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Combinatorics
Decisions
Decomposition
Distribution
Inventories
Inventory
Linear programming
Liquefied natural gas
Natural gas
Operations research
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Planning
Ports
Routing
Scheduling
Scheduling (Management)
Sea transport
Shipping
Stockpiling
Studies
Theory of Computation
Transportation
Vessels
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Summary:Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been transformed to liquid form for the purpose of transportation, which is mainly done by specially built LNG vessels travelling from the production site to the consumers. We describe a real-life ship routing and scheduling problem from the LNG business, with both inventory and berth capacity constraints at the liquefaction port. We propose a solution method where the routing and scheduling decisions are decomposed. The routing decisions consist of deciding which vessels should service which cargoes and in what sequence. The scheduling decisions are then to decide when to start servicing the cargoes while satisfying inventory and berth capacity constraints. The proposed solution method has been tested on several problem instances based on the real-life problem. The results show that the proposed solution method is well suited to solve this LNG shipping problem.
ISSN:0254-5330
1572-9338
DOI:10.1007/s10479-010-0794-y