Planning LNG Annual Delivery Programs with Speed Optimization and Multiple Loading Ports

Abstract

We study the planning problem of creating Annual Delivery Programs (ADPs) in the Liquefied Natural Gas Industry (LNG), in which an LNG producer must fulfill a series of long-term contracts for LNG deliveries with customers all over the world with a given fleet of LNG vessels. We expand existing models in the literature by also considering speed optimization and multiple loading ports. We denote this planning problem as the LNG-ADP with Speed Optimization and Multiple Load Ports (LNG-ADP-SO-MLP). We propose a novel and efficient mixed integer programming (MIP) model for the LNG-ADP-SO-MLP. The model is solved using a commercial MIP-solver on a number of realistic instances for two different LNG producers. It is shown that the solver obtains solutions with less than 1% optimality gaps within one hour for instances with a planning horizon of up to 180 days. This indicates that the model can efficiently be embedded within a rolling horizon heuristic to solve instances with longer planning horizons.