The role of LNG in energy supply

This paper reviews the current status of base-load LNG plants involved in international trade. In the historical review of the development of of the LNG industry brief references are made to peak-shaving LNG plants. The paper also describes the complex co-operative effort required to organize international LNG projects, and presents technical information concerning the refrigeration aspects of base-load LNG projects. The information includes brief reviews of liquefaction cycles, storage tanks, types of ships, receiving terminals, and the potential for utilizing the refrigeration available in revaporized LNG.     

Quay crane scheduling in container terminals

The problem of scheduling identical quay cranes moving along a common linear rail to handle containers for a ship is studied. The ship has a number of container-stacking compartments called bays, and only one quay crane can work on a bay at the same time. The objective of the scheduling problem is to find the work schedule for each quay crane which minimizes the ship’s stay time in port. Finding the optimal solution of the scheduling problem is computationally intractable and a heuristic is proposed to solve it. The heuristic first decomposes the difficult multi-crane scheduling problem into easier subproblems by partitioning the ship into a set of non-overlapping zones. The resulting subproblems for each possible partition are solved optimally by a simple rule. An effective algorithm for finding tight lower bounds is developed by modifying and enhancing an effective lower-bounding procedure proposed in the literature. Computational experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the heuristic on a set of test problems randomly generated based on typical terminal operations data. The computational results show that the heuristic can indeed find effective solutions for the scheduling problem, with the heuristic solutions on average 4.8% above their lower bounds.     

Inventory-based dispatching of automated guided vehicles on container terminals

This paper deals with automated guided vehicles (AGVs) which transport containers between the quay and the stack on automated container terminals. The focus is on the assignment of transportation jobs to AGVs within a terminal control system operating in real time. First, we describe a rather common problem formulation based on due times for the jobs and solve this problem both with a greedy priority rule based heuristic and with an exact algorithm. Subsequently, we present an alternative formulation of the assignment problem, which does not include due times. This formulation is based on a rough analogy to inventory management and is solved using an exact algorithm. The idea behind this alternative formulation is to avoid estimates of driving times, completion times, due times, and tardiness because such estimates are often highly unreliable in practice and do not allow for accurate planning. By means of simulation, we then analyze the different approaches. We show that the inventory-based model leads to better productivity on the terminal than the due-time-based formulation.     

Mathematical modelling and heuristic approaches to operation scheduling problems in an FMS environment

This paper addresses an operation scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total tardiness in a flexible manufacturing system with setup time consideration. The addressed problem is first described as a 0?1 integer programming model, and is then solved optimally. Subsequently, a heuristic is proposed to solve the problem in an acceptable running time. The heuristic begins on a schedule generator called ESCH to obtain an initial solution; then two procedures are designed to improve the solution quality. One is a sequence-improving procedure (SIP) for determining a better performance schedule from a certain routing plan; the other is a routing-exchanging procedure (REP) for selecting a good routing plan. Both procedures are achieved by simulated annealing. Computational experiments show that the proposed simulated annealing based heuristic performs well with respect to solution accuracy and efficiency.     

Thermodynamic analysis of the regasification of LNG for the desalination of sea water

A net zero work system for the recovery of refrigeration available from LNG during regasification is described. The system consists of a heat engine operating between an LNG heat exchanger in which regasification takes place and a sea water heat exchanger in which sea water is cooled to 246 K. A portion of the work output from the heat engine is used to drive a heat pump operating between the atmosphere and another sea water heat exchanger in which a second sea water stream is cooled to 246 K. The remaining portion of the heat engine work is used to separate fresh water from the ice-slurry. Peak fresh water output is approximately 6.7 kg water/kg LNG.     

A location-routing-inventory model for designing multisource distribution networks

This article studies a ternary-integration problem that incorporates location, inventory and routing decisions in designing a multisource distribution network. The objective of the problem is to minimize the total cost of location, routing and inventory. A mixed-integer programming formulation is first presented, and then a three-phase heuristic is developed to solve large-sized instances of the problem. The numerical study indicates that the proposed heuristic is both effective and efficient.     

Applied column generation-based approach to solve supply chain scheduling problems

More and more enterprises have chosen to adopt a made-to-order business model in order to satisfy diverse and rapidly changing customer demand. In such a business model, enterprises are devoted to reducing inventory levels in order to upgrade the competitiveness of the products. However, reductions in inventory levels and short lead times force the operation between production and distribution to cooperate closely, thus increasing the practicability of integrating the production and distribution stages. The complexity of supply chain scheduling problems (integrated production and distribution scheduling) is known to be NP-hard. To address the issues above, an efficient algorithm to solve the supply chain scheduling problem is needed. This paper studies a supply chain scheduling problem in which the production stage is modelled by an identical parallel machine scheduling problem and the distribution stage is modelled by a capacitated vehicle routing problem. Given a set of customer orders (jobs), the problem is to find a supply chain schedule such that the weighted summation of total job weighted completion time and total job delivering cost are minimised. The studied problem was first formulated as an integer programme and then solved by using column generation techniques in conjunction with a branch-and-bound approach to optimality. The results of the computational experiments indicate that the proposed approach can solve the test problems to optimality. Moreover, the average gap between the optimal solutions and the lower bounds is no more than 1.32% for these test problems.     

Optimizing Aircraft Routings in response to Groundings and Delays

This paper presents the time-band optimization model for reconstructing aircraft routings in response to groundings and delays experienced over the course of the day. Whenever the schedule is disrupted, the immediate objective of the airlines is to minimize the cost of reassigning aircraft to flights taking into account available resources and other system constraints. Associated costs are measured by flight delays and cancellations. The time-band model is constructed by transforming the routing problem into a time-based network in which the time horizon is discretized. The resulting formulation is an integral minimum cost network flow problem with side constraints. Conditions for which an exact solution to the model represents an optimal solution for the original problem are stated. The transformation procedure is polynomial with respect to the number of airports and flights in the schedule. Computational experience shows that the underlying network structure of the transformed problem often leads to integral solutions when solved with a standard linear programming code. Empirical results using Continental Airline data demonstrate that the solutions obtained are either provably optimal or no more than a few percentage points from the lower bound.     

The utilization of LH2 and LNG cold for generation of electric power by a cryogenic type stirling engine

The design of a LH₂ and LNG regasification system for a 100 MW power station is discussed. The Cryogenic Stirling Engine is chosen to operate the electrical generator. The results indicate that a system which recovers cold and generates power in parallel is economic, the problem lies in developing a large scale system.     

A graph partitioning strategy for solving large-scale crew scheduling problems

Railway crew scheduling deals with generating driver duties for a given train timetable such that all work regulations are met and the resulting schedule has minimal cost. Typical problem instances in the freight railway industry require the generation of duties for thousands of drivers operating tens of thousands of trains per week. Due to short runtime requirements, common solution approaches decompose the optimization problem into smaller subproblems that are solved separately. Several studies have shown that the way of decomposing the problem significantly affects the solution quality. An overall best decomposition strategy for a freight railway crew scheduling problem, though, is not known. In this paper, we present general considerations on when to assign two scheduled train movements to separate subproblems (and when to rather assign them to the same subproblem) and deduct a graph partitioning based decomposition algorithm with several variations. Using a set of real-world problem instances from a major European railway freight carrier, we evaluate our strategy and benchmark the performance of the decomposition algorithm both against a common non-decomposition algorithm and a lower bound on the optimal solution schedule. The test runs show that our decomposition algorithm is capable of producing high-quality solution schedules while significantly cutting runtimes compared to the non-decomposition solution algorithm. We are following a ”greenfield” approach, where no information on previous schedules is needed. Hence, our approach is applicable to any railway crew scheduling setting, including network enlargement, integration of new customers, etc.     

Finding minimum flow time cyclic schedules for non-identical, multistage jobs

Finding a minimum flow time cyclic schedule for a single, multistage job with a serial, re-entrant routing is known to be NP-hard. This paper addresses the problem of scheduling multiple, non-identical jobs in a cyclic fashion, where the job routings may be arbitrary partial orders as well as re-entrant. Given a fixed cycle length, our goal is to minimize a weighted sum of the job flow times. We present a general schedule construction algorithm for implementing a cyclic version of priority dispatch rules that accepts any user-defined tie-breaking function and naturally yields a feasible cyclic schedule. We also describe a pair of easily solvable subproblems that may be used to tighten existing cyclic schedules, as well as an iterative schedule improvement algorithm based on a technique called compression. A numerical study suggests that our schedule construction algorithm, called Cyclic PDR, outperforms its traditional noncyclic priority dispatch rule counterpart, as well as a previously proposed single-pass algorithm. The Cyclic PDR algorithm is shown to be particularly effective when used in conjunction with a least work remaining tie-breaking function. Taken together, our schedule construction and improvement techniques provide an effective solution approach for producing minimum flow time cyclic schedules.     

A bilinear programming model and a modified branch-and-bound algorithm for production planning in steel rolling mills with substitutable demand

In this paper, we address an instance of the dynamic capacitated multi-item lot-sizing problem (CMILSP) typically encountered in steel rolling mills. Production planning is carried out at the master production schedule level, where the various end items lot sizes are determined such that the total cost is minimised. Through incorporating the various technological constraints associated with the manufacturing process, the integrated production–inventory problem is formulated as a mixed integer bilinear program (MIBLP). Typically, such class of mathematical models is solved via linearisation techniques which transform the model to an equivalent MILP (mixed integer linear program) at the expense of increased model dimensionality. This paper presents an alternative branch-and-bound based algorithm that exploits the special structure of the mathematical model to minimise the number of branches and obtain the bound at each node. The performance of our algorithm is benchmarked against that of a classical linearisation technique for several problem instances and the obtained results are reported.     

Analysis of temperature and pressure changes in liquefied natural gas (LNG) cryogenic tanks

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being developed as a transportation fuel for heavy vehicles such as trucks and transit buses, to lessen the dependency on oil and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The LNG stations are properly designed to prevent the venting of natural gas (NG) from LNG tanks, which can cause evaporative greenhouse gas emissions and result in fluctuations of fuel flow and changes of fuel composition. Boil-off is caused by the heat added into the LNG fuel during the storage and fueling. Heat can leak into the LNG fuel through the shell of tank during the storage and through hoses and dispensers during the fueling. Gas from tanks onboard vehicles, when returned to LNG tanks, can add additional heat into the LNG fuel. A thermodynamic and heat transfer model has been developed to analyze different mechanisms of heat leak into the LNG fuel. The evolving of properties and compositions of LNG fuel inside LNG tanks is simulated. The effect of a number of buses fueled each day on the possible total fuel loss rate has been analyzed. It is found that by increasing the number of buses, fueled each day, the total fuel loss rate can be reduced significantly. It is proposed that an electric generator be used to consume the boil-off gas or a liquefier be used to re-liquefy the boil-off gas to reduce the tank pressure and eliminate fuel losses. These approaches can prevent boil-off of natural gas emissions, and reduce the costs of LNG as transportation fuel.     

Skid scheduling algorithm for a shipbuilding company

In the small- and medium-sized shipbuilding companies, the skid system, which is a kind of slips located on flat seashore, is widely used. To improve the productivity of the skid, many shipbuilders adopt the semi-tandem system, under which a number of ships can be built on a skid simultaneously. The focus of the research reported in this paper is to develop an efficient spatial schedule for the skid system that uses the semi-tandem system. First, we develop a length-time, two-dimensional packing model for this problem and propose a heuristic algorithm to use the skid efficiently when the launching schedule for ships is given. Then, by combining this heuristic and the GA (genetic algorithm), we develop a hybrid GA algorithm to determine the launching schedule of ships as well as the spatial schedule for the skid, which maximises the number of ships that can be built on the skid and minimises delayed or early launching of each ship. Through performing a series of computational experiments, we finally show that the proposed algorithm can provide solutions of good quality very efficiently.     

Spatial scheduling for shape-changing mega-blocks in a shipbuilding company

To overcome space restriction and to increase productivity, some shipbuilding companies use floating-docks on the sea instead of dry-docks on the land. In that case, a floating-crane that is capable of lifting very heavy objects (up to 3600?tons) is used to handle the blocks which are the basic units in shipbuilding processes, and therefore, very large blocks (also called mega-blocks) can be used to build a ship, but because there are some positional restrictions under which the mega-block assembly yard can be constructed, the space is the scarcest resource in the process. The focus of the research reported in this paper is to develop an efficient spatial schedule for the mega-block assembly yard. First, we develop a length-time two-dimensional packing model for this problem. Since the optimisation model cannot be solved using an analytical method, we propose a GA-based heuristic algorithm using computational geometry theory. Through performing a series of computational experiments, we finally show that the proposed spatial scheduling algorithm can provide solutions of good quality very efficiently.     

基于JITD的服务备件二级分销网络集成研究

从供应链集成的角度出发,使用双层规划建立了服务备件二级分销网络的设施选址-运输路线安排-库存控制问题(CLRIP)模型,确定了分销中心的位置、车辆的运输路线等。该模型充分考虑决策部门和顾客双方的利益,针对服务备件的价值高以及服务水平要求高的特点,将按需拉动的准时制配送策略（JITD）应用于分销网络设计中,在降低系统成本的同时,可以大幅度提高配送的准时性和稳定性。设计了该模型的启发式算法,通过算例验证了模型和算法的有效性。研究结果有助于优化服务备件分销网络结构、提高配送准时性和降低物流成本。     

马氏过程的随机库存路径问题模型与算法

考虑到随机需求库存路径问题(Inventory Routing Problem,IRP)本身所具有的马尔可夫、随机等特性,从其现实意义出发,将IRP描述为一个马尔可夫决策过程(Markov decision process,MDP).在运用非线性背包问题的求解方法得到初始策略并构成直接配送线路的基础上,提出一种本地搜索算法对其进行优化.通过实例演算.结果表明了该算法的实用性和有效性.     

A capacitated vehicle routing problem with order available time in e-commerce industry

In this article, a variant of the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) called the capacitated vehicle routing problem with order available time (CVRPOAT) is considered, which is observed in the operations of the current e-commerce industry. In this problem, the orders are not available for delivery at the beginning of the planning period. CVRPOAT takes all the assumptions of CVRP, except the order available time, which is determined by the precedent order picking and packing stage in the warehouse of the online grocer. The objective is to minimize the sum of vehicle completion times. An efficient tabu search algorithm is presented to tackle the problem. Moreover, a Lagrangian relaxation algorithm is developed to obtain the lower bounds of reasonably sized problems. Based on the test instances derived from benchmark data, the proposed tabu search algorithm is compared with a published related genetic algorithm, as well as the derived lower bounds. Also, the tabu search algorithm is compared with the current operation strategy of the online grocer. Computational results indicate that the gap between the lower bounds and the results of the tabu search algorithm is small and the tabu search algorithm is superior to the genetic algorithm. Moreover, the CVRPOAT formulation together with the tabu search algorithm performs much better than the current operation strategy of the online grocer.     

液化天然气生产储运中的蒸气回收

为提高天然气能量密度,通常将天然气液化后在其常压沸点约 112 K下存储。由于环保的要求,对液化天然气 (LNG)的需求量越来越大。对 LNG的生产及接收终端的储存及运输工程中的蒸发气 (BOG)的回收和利用是提高工厂经济效益的重要一环。讨论了压缩和再液化 BOG的回收方法。认为运用计算机模拟这一工程上新的工具,对提高 LNG工厂的安全性和经济效益,同时降低投资成本是很有帮助的。简介了这方面的一些事例,并提出了一些建议。     

Scheduling in a Semi-Ordered Flow-shop Without Intermediate Queues

The problem of finding a minimum makespan permutation schedule in a deterministic flow-shop without intermediate queues is equivalent to the shortest distance routing traveling salesman problem. If the task system is semi-ordered, the associated distance matrix of the corresponding traveling salesman problem is found to exhibit some peculiar characteristics. Consequently, we are able to derive some important results which help us to eliminate permutations in the search of the minimum makespan permutation schedule. The most important result is that the optimal permutation schedule is pyramidal. An algorithm, having quadratic worst-case complexity in terms of the number of partial schedules explicitly enumerated, has been presented. Some particular cases of the semi-ordered flow-shop are also discussed.