Ship Routing Design for the Oily Liquid Waste Collection

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of ship routing design for collecting and transporting the oily liquid waste from a number of ports to a waste treatment center. The aim is simultaneously to construct a set of ship routes and to determine the number and the types of ships in a fleet at the minimum total cost. The problem is considered as a vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet of vehicles and multiple trips (VRPHMT). The VRPHMT is a combination of two variants of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) by including two additional features. The first is the heterogeneous fleet of vehicles where number and types of vehicles have to be determined, and the second is multiple trips where vehicles may perform more than one route or trip as long as the total duration of each vehicles does not exceed the planning period.