A Facility Allocation-Location Approach to Analyze the Capability of the State-Owned Mexican Petroleum Company to Respond to the Closure of Pipelines

Abstract

In recent years, Mexico has reported significant economic losses caused by the organized theft of gasoline at different stages of the supply chain of its national petroleum company. As measure against these actions, the government ordered the specific closure of distribution pipelines between refineries and storage depots. However, this led to large shortage of gasoline and economic losses in the south central region of Mexico, even though distribution through tanker trucks was increased. Thus, the response capability of the company must be analyzed to quantitatively assess the shortage risk and propose alternatives if such disruption happens again. The present work addresses this task through a facility allocation-location approach where the location of additional storage depots was considered. For this analysis, the most updated data regarding the locations of gasoline storage depots and stations was used. Also, due to the large size of this data, the results of this approach were obtained through the development of a hybrid meta-heuristic. The results support the increase of storage depots to reduce the shortage risk and the service distance. This corroborates the public discussion that distribution of gasoline is restricted by the current infrastructure and that additional storage depots are needed. This infrastructure can also provide more control to reduce gasoline theft.