A Tanker Scheduling Decision System for Ship Owners in the Spot Charter Market

A Tanker Scheduling Decision System for Ship Owners in the Spot Charter Market

This paper treats a Decision System for tanker scheduling problems faced by ship owners or operators. A brief review of relevant literature leads us to get a modified set-packing model for tanker scheduling in spot charter market. We then generated all feasible schedules, i.e. the decision variables for each ship under control by using some graph theory. Next, we developed a user-friendly Decision System with proper GUI for tanker scheduling on PC base. We examined the performance of the system by using various scenarios reflecting the practices of ship owner's tanker scheduling. As a result, the system solved the set-packing model tackling a real size problem, for instance, a problem with 30 tankers and 50 optional cargoes, in a couple of minutes by using the embedded LINDO package.