Modelling crew scheduling in offshore supply vessels

AbstractCrew 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.