Continuous-time scheduling of tanker lightering in crude oil supply chain

This paper address the scheduling of marine vessels for the crude oil tanker lightering process. A novel continuous-time mathematical formulation is developed based on the concept of event points proposed in earlier work on scheduling of chemical processes [1-5]. A sequence of event points is introduced for each vessel and binary variables are defined to determine whether or not at each event point the vessel is to start a task consists of docking/undocking, pumping oil, and traveling. The model leads to a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem, which can be solved to global optimality efficiently. A case study will be presented and the computational result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.