Abstract
This paper introduces a pickup and delivery problem encountered in servicing of offshore oil and gas platforms in the Norwegian Sea. A single vessel must perform pickups and deliveries at several offshore platforms. All delivery demands originate at a supply base and all pickup demands are also destined to the base. The vessel capacity may never be exceeded along its route. In addition, the amount of space available for loading and unloading operations is limited at each platform. The problem, called the Single Vehicle Pickup and Delivery Problem with Capacitated Customers consists of designing a least cost vehicle (vessel) route starting and ending at the depot (base), visiting each customer (platform), and such that there is always sufficient capacity in the vehicle and at the customer location to perform the pickup and delivery operations. This paper describes several construction heuristics as well as a tabu search algorithm. Computational results are presented.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the Norwegian Research Council and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under grant 39682-05. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to Bjørnar Aas who introduced the problem to the authors and provided valuable information, and to two referees for their valuable comments.
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Gribkovskaia, I., Laporte, G. & Shlopak, A. A tabu search heuristic for a routing problem arising in servicing of offshore oil and gas platforms. J Oper Res Soc 59, 1449–1459 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602469
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602469