A heuristic approach for international crude oil transportation scheduling problems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve a practical ship scheduling problem for international crude oil transportation. The problem is considered as a vehicle routing problem with split deliveries. The objective of this paper is to find an optimal assignment of tankers, a sequence of visiting and loading volume simultaneously in order to minimize the total distance satisfying the capacity of tankers. A savings-based meta-heuristic algorithm with lot sizing parameters and volume assignment heuristic is developed. The proposed method is applied to solve a case study with real data. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm compared with that of human operators. Copyright © 2012 by JSME.