Paper Info
Title
A New Formulation Based on Customer Delivery Patterns for a Maritime Inventory Routing Problem
Abstract
AbstractIn this paper we address a maritime inventory routing problem encountered by one of the world's largest producers of liquefied natural gas LNG. The producer is responsible for the LNG inventories at the liquefaction plant, the loading port with a limited number of berths, and the routing and scheduling of a heterogeneous fleet of LNG ships. In addition, the producer has to fulfill a set of long-term contracts to customers all around the world. The producer's goal is to create a minimum-cost long-term delivery program that respects the long-term contracts while maximizing revenue from selling LNG in the spot market. We introduce a new formulation for this problem arising from a novel decomposition scheme based on delivery patterns. To solve this formulation, we develop an exact branch-price-and-cut algorithm. Computational results show that this new formulation provides much tighter lower bounds than the only known mixed integer programming MIP formulation for this problem. Furthermore, on a set of 27 benchmark instances, the proposed branch-price-and-cut method clearly outperforms a commercial MIP solver applied to the existing MIP model.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1287/trsc.2013.0503
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
maritime transportation,inventory routing,branch-price-and-cut,delivery patterns,valid inequalities
Revenue,Mathematical optimization,Inventory routing problem,Scheduling (computing),Operations research,Integer programming,Liquefied natural gas,Solver,Mathematics,Operations management,Spot market
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
49
2
1526-5447
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.39
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jørgen Glomvik Rakke1614.30
Henrik Andersson219816.36
Marielle Christiansen376250.72
Guy Desaulniers487462.90