EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1533. Sailing through uncertainty: mathematical optimization for ship pipe routing in the energy transition

Invited abstract in session WD-35: Optimization under Uncertainty in Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management, stream Stochastic, Robust and Distributionally Robust Optimization.

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 44 (building: 303A)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Berend Markhorst
Stochastics Group, CWI
2. Joost Berkhout
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
3. Alessandro Zocca
CMS, California Institute of Technology
4. Jeroen Pruyn
Maritime and transport technology, Delft University of Technology
5. Rob van der Mei
CWI

Abstract

The maritime industry must prepare for the energy transition from fossil fuels to sustainable alternatives, which makes the design of future-proof ships even more important. In the design phase of a ship, it is currently uncertain which fuels it will use in the future due to many external factors. In fact, a ship typically sails for decades, increasing the likelihood that it will have to use different fuels over its lifetime. When changing fuels, pipe route design, which ensures a connection between the fuel tanks and the engine rooms, is expensive, time-consuming, and mainly done by hand. Motivated by this, together with maritime experts, we propose a mathematical approach for modeling uncertainty in automatic pipe routing with deterministic, stochastic, and robust optimization. All three approaches are based on state-of-the-art integer linear optimization models for the Stochastic Steiner Forest Problem and adjusted to the maritime domain using specific constraints for pipe routing given by the maritime experts. We compare the approaches using both artificial and realistic data of a commercial ship design company and show that considering uncertainty using stochastic optimization and robust optimization leads to cost reductions. Additionally, we extend our approaches with decomposition methods to solve large-scale (industry) instances.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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