Vessel routing with pickups and deliveries: An application to the supply of offshore oil platforms

This paper presents a new routing problem, the Vessel Routing Problem with Selective Pickups and Deliveries (VRPSPD), an extension of existing pickup and delivery problems that arises in the planning of logistics operations in the offshore oil and gas industry. The VRPSPD is a single-vessel model that can lead to significant economic improvements to the current planning scheme without having a very large impact on the operations. In addition, we formulate a Multi-Vessel Routing Problem with Pickups and Deliveries (mVRPPD) that leads to even larger economical gains, but also entails more important changes in the current planning and operations. To quantify and justify the benefits of the VRPSPD and mVRPPD, an industry case based on real data was constructed and solved for 300 days. The VRPSPD is solvable with a commercial solver for most real-size instances. However, for the mVRPPD on the largest instances, it was necessary to develop a state-of-the-art adaptive large neighborhood heuristic search to reduce computational time.