OCCPTS - Oil Tanker Scheduling System

The first scheduling system we have completed is a tanker scheduling system. This system has been developed for Indian Oil Corporation, to schedule tankers carrying petroleum products. The problem tackled by the system involves scheduling movements of several (about 20) tankers to distribute 9 different finished petroleum products (such as diesel, kerosene, furnace oil, etc) between 12 ports along India's coastline.
The input to the system consists of demand/supply patterns at these 12 ports, initial tanker positions, port and tanker characteristics, inter-port distances, etc. The system handles a variety of constraints such as loading of multiple products, tanker-port compatibility constraints, tanker-product preferences, jetty constraints, cleaning constraints, etc. The system uses constraint directed heuristic beam search to prepare a schedule.
The system is used to prepare monthly schedules of movement of oil tankers. It can also be used for revising the schedule on a day-to-day basis to cater to unforeseen conditions such as tanker and refinery problems. These decisions are currently taken with no computer support.