Crude Oil Tanker Routing and Scheduling

This paper illustrates how operations research can be applied to large-scale maritime crude oil transportation. The more the industry strives to improve the efficiency of their supply chains the more complex and involved planning tasks become. Crude oil tanker routing and scheduling is a good example for a highly complex planning problem in the petroleum and shipping industry. It is also a prevalent problem for which research can provide solutions that exploit the existing potential for improvement. We describe the maritime transportation part of the crude oil supply chain which we denote as the crude oil tanker routing and scheduling problem (COTRASP). Throughout this article, mathematical notation is used as a method to illustrate the various aspects of the problem. Cited literature shows the efforts made to guarantee efficient transportation and realize cost savings in related problems. Finally, solution approaches are discussed and suggestions for further research are made.