Modelling crew scheduling in offshore supply vessels

Abstract

Crew scheduling problems have been widely studied in various transportation sectors, such as airlines, railways, and urban buses. However to date it appears that application of these problems in sea transport has been very limited. In this paper, we explore key differences between various transport settings, and propose mixed-integer programming formulations for both the crew scheduling and re-scheduling problems for a company operating a fleet of offshore supply vessels (OSVs) on a global scale. Computational results on an extensive set of problems show that our proposed models are practically applicable to generate real-time solutions. We also present a thorough statistical analysis of key problem parameters, and share insights regarding their impacts.

Keywords:

• Sea transport
• crew scheduling
• integer programming
• offshore supply vessels

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank three careful reviewers, whose comments helped to improve the content and presentation of the paper. We would like to thank Mr Neil Thomson, Crew Logistics Manager of Subsea7, for providing us invaluable practical insights regarding the problem investigated in this paper.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Effort of second, third, and fourth authors partly sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Material Command, USAF, [grant number FA9550-14-1-0203]. The US Government is authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purpose notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon.