Vessel route optimization for offshore marine transport

In offshore upstream oil and gas industry, daily logistics and transportation are being served by Offshore Support Vessels (OSV) such as Platform Supply Vessel (PSV), Anchor Handling Tug Supply (AHTS) and Crew Utility Vessel. Marine transportation is then a substantive operating costs. To stay competitive, the cost should be reduced and vessel route optimization can be a tool. The case study company is an exploration and production (E&P) company operating in the Gulf of Thailand. At present, the planning and scheduling tasks of marine vessel in this area are mostly conducted by manual with none use of optimizing tools. Hence, cost and time saving can be expected by the use of enhanced and well-developed vessel route planning. This paper applies the two-phase sweep algorithm to conduct route planning, it is assumed that there are five vessels with varied capacities obtainable to serve offshore daily demands at thirty remote platforms. All demand locations are first to be clustered into groups using polar-angles sweeping method and then refine the routes of vessel for each cluster. All processing phases are implemented using functions and add-in programs of Microsoft Excel. It was noted that the primary stage of clustering plays a very important role to the solution results. However, overall outcomes of process experiments present that the answers are stable and acceptable.