APPLICATION OF TRANSPORTATION MODEL TO SOLVE TANKERS’ – ROUTING PROBLEM

Abstract

The problem of selecting minimum cost routes for tankers in distributing petroleum products and satisfying customers’ requirement without scarcity in Nigeria remains a huge challenge to major marketers in the oil industries. The cost of transporting petroleum products from sources to destinations matters a lot to oil marketers because of the direct impact it has on their profits. The means of distributing petroleum products from refineries to depots or filling stations are tankers’ routing and pipelines. In this research, we extended some existing tankers’-routing models in literature which use a discrete integer programming approach to determine efficient and effective distribution of petroleum products. Consequently, we developed a new transportation linear programming algorithm to determine minimum cost routes in the delivery of petroleum product from their supply centers (refinery) to demand centers (filling stations). The significance of the application we adopted in this research lies in the modified distribution approach to tackle the complexity involved when transportation problems are formulated as linear programming problem having several variables and constraints. In this research, we formulate a new version of transportation model of tankers’ routing with the aim of reducing the cost of petroleum products delivery. The proposed transportation linear programming model was applied to a numerical example alongside other existing transportation algorithms. It is observed that, the new algorithm produced approximately the same total cost obtained by using other existing algorithms