Inventory constrained maritime routing and scheduling for multi-commodity liquid bulk, Part I: Applications and model [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research]

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Description:
This paper formulates a model for finding a minimum cost routing in a network for a heterogeneous fleet of ships engaged in pickup and delivery of several liquid bulk products. The problem is frequently encountered by maritime chemical transport companies, including oil companies serving an archipelago of islands. The products are assumed to require dedicated compartments in the ship. The problem is to decide how much of each product should be carried by each ship from supply ports to demand ports, subject to the inventory level of each product in each port being maintained between certain levels that are set by the production rates, the consumption rates, and the storage capacities of the various products in each port. This important and challenging inventory constrained multi-ship pickup-delivery problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear program. We show that the model can be reformulated as an equivalent mixed-integer linear program with special structure. Over 100 test problems are randomly generated and solved using CPLEX 7.5. The results of our numerical experiments illuminate where problem structure can be exploited in order to solve larger instances of the model. Part II of the sequel will deal with new algorithms that take advantage of model properties.