Solving Routing and Scheduling Problems in Tanker Shipping by an Effective MILP-based Column Generation Algorithm

COCCOLA, MARIANA; DONDO, RODOLFO; MENDEZ, CARLOS

Budapest

Simposio; 24th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering ? ESCAPE 24; 2014

This paper presents a novel column generation algorithm for the routing and scheduling of a fleet of multi-parcel chemical tankers. In our procedure, the conventional dynamic programming route generator is replaced by an efficient continuous-time MILP-slave problem. The proposed approach outperforms the exact optimization model and other heuristic decomposition methods presented in the literature to solve a real-world example of a shipping company operating in the Asia Pacific Region.