Maritime inventory routing with speed optimization: A MIQCP formulation for a tanker fleet servicing FPSO units

Abstract

This paper presents a continuous-time formulation for the management of deep-sea floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) units, which process and store crude oil from nearby oil platforms while waiting for a shuttle tanker to arrive and collect it. A heterogeneous fleet of tanker vessels travelling between the FPSO units and a port refinery is available, with the optimization deciding on the number and type of vessels to use, their route and travelling speed. The goal is to achieve an environmentally friendly solution featuring vessels travelling at lower speeds to minimize fuel consumption (a quadratic function of speed), which may require renting additional shuttle tankers to maintain production. The resulting mixed-integer quadratically constrained problems (MIQCP) can be solved by GUROBI, but not to global optimality, whereas a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) relaxation that underestimates the total operating cost can tackle moderate problem sizes (5 FPSOs and 4 shuttle tankers).