A vessel pickup and delivery problem from the disruption management in offshore supply vessel operations

Abstract

This paper considers a vessel pickup and delivery problem that arises in the case of disruptions in the supply vessel logistics in the offshore oil and gas industry. The problem can be modelled as a multi-vehicle pickup and delivery problem where delivery orders are transported by supply vessels from an onshore supply base (depot) to a set of offshore oil and gas installations, while pickup orders are to be transported from the installations back to the supply base (i.e. backload). We present both an arc-flow and a path-flow formulation for the problem. For the path-flow formulation we also propose an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for generating the paths, which represent feasible vessel voyages. It is shown through a computational study on various realistic test instances provided by a major oil and gas company that the path-flow model is superior with respect to computational performance.