Vehicle routing and dispatching for emergency personnel evacuation from off-shore oil platforms

Abstract

The vehicle routing (VR) and dispatching for emergency personnel evacuation (EPE) from off-shore oil platforms is a complex and very important problem for the oil and gas industry. Frequently, the emergency evacuation plan has to be modified due to uncertain data and the occurrence of an event. Therefore, the personnel inventory control and scheduling algorithms must be able to take into account uncertainty. In this work, this system is divided into inventories and jobs i.e., loading, unloading, and transportation, and the EPE problem is solved optimizing a transportation capacitated network which is coupled to a set of parallel plants (platforms), where each plant has two processes. In this system, the platforms are served using a dispatching rule, and the VR and dispatching is done solving a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem (MINLP) each time an event occurs. This approach is illustrated with a case study of a six-vehicle, eight-platform, off-shore oil platform system. Although small, this case study preserves the main characteristics of a real complex since it includes different vehicle types (boats and helicopters), and different platform and vehicle capacities