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J Heuristics (2012) 18:821848
DOI 10.1007/s10732-012-9206-6
Received: 20 February 2012 / Accepted: 16 July 2012 / Published online: 9 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract Liqueed Natural Gas (LNG) is steadily becoming a common mode for commercializing natural gas. Due to the capital intensive nature of LNG projects, the optimal design of LNG supply chains is extremely important from a protability perspective. Motivated by the need for a model that can assist in the design analysis of LNG supply chains, we address an LNG inventory routing problem where optimized ship schedules have to be developed for an LNG project. In this paper, we present an arc-ow formulation based on the MIP model of Song and Furman (Comput. Oper. Res., 2010). We also present a set of construction and improvement heuristics to solve this model efciently. The heuristics are evaluated based on a set of realistic test instances that are very large relative to the problem instances seen in recent literature related to this problem. Extensive computational results indicate that the proposed methods are computationally efcient in nding optimal or near optimal solutions and are substantially faster than state-of-the-art commercial optimization software.
V. Goel ( ) K.C. Furman
ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company, 3120 Buffalo Speedway, Houston, TX 77027, USA e-mail: mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected]
K.C. Furmane-mail: [email protected]
J.-H. Song
ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, Houston, TX, USA
Present address:J.-H. Song
Global Technology SK Innovation, Seoul, Korea e-mail: mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected]
A.S. El-Bakry
ExxonMobil Production Company, 800 Bell St., Houston, TX 77002, USA e-mail: mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected]
Large neighborhood search for LNG inventory routing
Vikas Goel Kevin C. Furman Jin-Hwa Song
Amr S. El-Bakry
822 V. Goel et al.
Keywords Liqueed natural gas LNG Ship schedule optimization Maritime
inventory routing
1 Introduction
Natural gas is expected to be the worlds fastest growing fossil fuel with consumption increasing at an average rate of 1.6 % per year from 2008 to 2035 (US Energy Information Administration 2011). In many cases, large reserves of natural gas are located in areas of little or no local demand. As a result, natural gas must be transported over long distances, either via pipelines or shipped as liqueed natural gas (LNG) in specially designed ships. To be transported as LNG,...