A variable neighbourhood search heuristic for disruption management in offshore oil and gas logistics

Abstract

This paper studies operational planning and disruption management in offshore oil and gas logistics. A significant amount of time is currently spent on operational planning, and major costs are caused by disruptions to the planned routes and schedules for the vessels supplying the offshore installations. The disruptions are mainly due to uncertain and harsh weather conditions. To be able to solve realistic instances of the planning problem, a variable neighbourhood search heuristic is proposed, and tested on instances based on data provided by the case company. The computational results show that the heuristic finds optimal solutions for all the problem instances where the optimal solution is known, and finds high-quality solution for larger instances.