Decomposition of a large scale routing problem of LNG vessels.

LNG’s share of world’s energy consumption is increasingNeed for more research on LNG supply chain optimizationA real-life LNG ship routing and scheduling problem was presentedSolution method utilizing problem structure:Decomposing into a master problem and one subproblem for each fleet segmentSubproblems solved by a multi-start local search heuristic embedding distance measuresMaster problem is an IP model solved by a commercial solverOn-going research tries to exploit waiting time