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A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels

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Journal of the Operational Research Society

Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Michel Povlovitsch Seixas, André Bergsten Mendes & Marco Antonio Brinati

  2. Department of Mechatronics Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Marcos Ribeiro Pereira Barretto

  3. Department Transportation Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Claudio Barbieri da Cunha

  4. CENPES Petrobras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Roberto Edward Cruz

  5. School of Management, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Yue Wu

  6. Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, Engineering Centre of Excellence, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Philip A Wilson

Authors
  1. Michel Povlovitsch Seixas
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  2. André Bergsten Mendes
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  3. Marcos Ribeiro Pereira Barretto
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  4. Claudio Barbieri da Cunha
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  5. Marco Antonio Brinati
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  6. Roberto Edward Cruz
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  7. Yue Wu
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  8. Philip A Wilson
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Supplementary information accompanies this paper on the Journal of the Operational Research Society website (www.palgrave-journals.com/jors)

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Seixas, M., Mendes, A., Pereira Barretto, M. et al. A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels. J Oper Res Soc 67, 148–158 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2015.62

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2015.62

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