Order Management in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

The supply order management problem (SOMP) is an important planning problem in the offshore oil and gas industry. The SOMP consists of determining, for a given departure for an offshore supply vessel following a fixed route, which orders to and from offshore oil and gas installations to serve and which orders to postpone. We propose a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for this purpose. By setting up the model in a number of ways and running simulations using the model, we compare the performance of various planning strategies. As a case study, we use data from Petrobras, which is the main state-owned oil company in Brazil. It is shown that reductions in the amount of critical order delays can be achieved with careful planning using the proposed MIP model.