Column generation approach to ship scheduling problems for international crude oil transportation

Nowadays, the new trend of global economy has driven the business strategy from the local to the global supply chain optimization. The comprehensive logistics solutions are critical to integrate supply chain management in the global landscape. We propose a column generation algorithm to solve the ship scheduling problem for international crude oil distribution. The problem is to find an optimal assignment and sequence and loading volume of demand simultaneously in order to minimize the total distance satisfying the capacity of the tankers. The problem can be generalized as split delivery routing problem. In this paper, an efficient algorithm by using the column generation is developed to generate a feasible solution taking into account for several practical constraints. The performance of the proposed method is compared with a heuristic algorithm and that of human operators. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for a real case study.