A polynomial dynamic programming algorithm for crude oil transportation planning

A polynomial dynamic programming algorithm for crude oil transportation planning

Complex system

Cost function

Crude oil

crude oil transportation

Customer satisfaction

dynamic programming

Dynamic programming

Inventory control

Large scale systems

Lot sizing

lot-sizing

Mathematical model

Petrochemicals

Petroleum transportation

Polynomials

Production control

Sales

scheduling

Scheduling

Ships

Transportation

Crude oil transportation is a central logistics operation in petrochemical industry because its cost represents a significant part in the cost of petrochemical products. In this paper, we consider the transportation by tankers or trucks. We show that under some realistic assumptions, this problem can be transformed into a single item lot sizing problem with limited production and inventory capacities. We develop a strongly polynomial dynamic programming algorithm to solve it. The problem of crude oil transportation is very difficult. There are few efficient methods in this domain. In the model considered in this paper, crude oil is directly shipped from a supplier port to n client ports to satisfy customer demands over T future periods. The supplier port disposes a fleet of identical tankers with limited capacity. The inventory capacities of customers are limited and time-varying. The backlogging is admitted. The objective is to find an optimal shipment plan minimizing the total cost over the T-period horizon. When the number of tankers is unlimited and customer demands are independent, shipment plans of different customers become independent. This problem can be considered as n independent problems. Each of them can be transformed into a single item lot sizing problem with limited production and inventory capacities, where tanker capacity corresponds to production capacity in classical lot sizing models. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) transformation of a transportation planning problem into a lot-sizing problem

2) an O(T3) algorithm is proposed to solve it

and 3) the results can also be applied to terrestrial transportation with direct deliveries. 2006 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

2012

Chu, Chengbin

Chu, Feng

Zhou, Mengchu

Chen, Haoxun

Shen, Qingning

journalArticle

IISWUFXB

15455955

10.1109/TASE.2011.2164524