A Decision Support System for Scheduling Fleets of Fuel Supply Vessels

Fleets of fuel supply vessels are used to provide ships anchored in ports different oil products. Demand is satisfied based on a pull system, where oil shipments are triggered by orders placed by customers and delivered on a specific agreed day. The aim of this paper is to develop a time-effective Decision Support System (DSS) in order to aid the fleet schedulers to decide in a very short time (usually less than 10 minutes in the ships' fuel supply business) if they will accept new orders, based on the fleet's capacity and availability, and generate a feasible sub-optimal operation schedule. The DSS was tested in a small Hellenic oil company and the empirical evaluation is presented