Optimal planning of liquefied natural gas deliveries
•We investigate the problem of designing an annual delivery plan for an LNG producer.•We describe a novel exact arc-flow formulation.•The proposed formulation accommodates several practical constraints.•Computational experiments were carried out on a set of real data.•Optimal solutions for large-sca...
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Published in | Transportation research. Part C, Emerging technologies Vol. 69; pp. 79 - 90 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Elsevier India Pvt Ltd
01.08.2016
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | •We investigate the problem of designing an annual delivery plan for an LNG producer.•We describe a novel exact arc-flow formulation.•The proposed formulation accommodates several practical constraints.•Computational experiments were carried out on a set of real data.•Optimal solutions for large-scale instances can be provided in a reasonable CPU time.
We investigate the problem of designing an optimal annual delivery plan for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). This problem requires determining the long-term cargo delivery dates and the assignment of vessels to the cargoes while accommodating several constraints, including berth availability, liquefaction terminal inventory, planned maintenance, and bunkering requirements. We describe a novel mixed-integer programming formulation that captures important industry requirements and constraints with the objective of minimizing the vessel fleet size. A peculiar property of the proposed formulation is that it includes a polynomial number of variables and constraints and is, in our experience, computationally tractable for large problem instances using a commercial solver. Extensive computational runs demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model for real instances provided by a major energy company that involve up to 118 cargoes and a 373-day planning horizon. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0968-090X 1879-2359 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.trc.2016.05.017 |