Bi-objective offshore supply vessel planning with costs and persistence objectives

Abstract

This paper introduces a bi-objective model for the offshore supply vessel planning problem (SVPP) in the oil & gas industry. The SVPP consists of determining a new weekly plan for sailing the platform supply vessels whenever the sailing plan needs revising due to some major events, such as the arrival or removal of drilling rigs, and demand increase or reduction in the current platforms. Apart from remaining cost-efficient, the new weekly plan is required to be persistent, i.e., exhibiting few changes from the previous plan. To achieve this, we propose a bi-objective optimization framework that enables the planners to simultaneously take into account both costs and persistence-related objectives. The framework encompasses a bi-objective SVPP model and a genetic search algorithm adapted from Borthen et al. (2018). We show that the proposed algorithm is able to provide high-quality solutions in reasonable time and has the decision support capability in real offshore operation planning.