Petroleum and Refinery

Biography

Biography: Tatsushi Nishi

Abstract

The global logistics strategy is driven by the new economic structure. Oil is considered as one of the most consumed energy resource in Japan. Due to lack of the domestic resource, Japan was the second-largest importer of oil in the world after the United States in 2009. This country is primarily dependent on the Middle East for its oil imports, as roughly 80 percent of Japanese crude oil imports originate in the region up from 70 percent in the mid-1980. In this paper, we propose an optimization approach to solve the international crude oil transportation problem. In order to increase the efficiency, the assignment, the sequence and the loading volume of demands should be optimized simultaneously. In many practical situations, these decisions are executed manually by the negotiation between the human operators based on the contract with suppliers individually. In order to help the decision of human operators, the automatic generation of the practical ship scheduling is highly required to avoid the human errors and increase the efficiency of decision making. In this paper, we present matheuristics application to propose a solution approach to the international crude oil transportation problem based on a real loading planning case in Japanese oil industry. A column generation approach together with partial optimization metaheuristics under special intensification conditions is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.