A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels

Michel Povlovitsch Seixas, André Bergsten Mendes, Marcos Ribeiro Pereira Barretto, Claudio Barbieri da Cunha, Marco Antonio Brinati, Roberto Edward Cruz, Yue Wu and Philip A Wilson
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Michel Povlovitsch Seixas: Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
André Bergsten Mendes: Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Marcos Ribeiro Pereira Barretto: Department of Mechatronics Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Claudio Barbieri da Cunha: Department Transportation Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Marco Antonio Brinati: Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering - University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Roberto Edward Cruz: CENPES Petrobras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Yue Wu: School of Management, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Philip A Wilson: Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, Engineering Centre of Excellence, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2016, vol. 67, issue 1, 148-158

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.

Date: 2016
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