TITLE:
Minimizing the Environmental Risk from Oil Tanker Grounding Accidents in the High North
AUTHORS:
Brice Assimizele, Robin T. Bye
KEYWORDS:
OR in Maritime Industry, Mixed Integer Programming, Search and Rescue, Oil Spill, Risk Management, Decision Support Systems, Dynamic Resource Allocation
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Operations Research,
Vol.10 No.3,
May
14,
2020
ABSTRACT: To address the high environmental risk related to the increased oil tanker traffic in the High North, the Norwegian Coastal Administration (NCA) manages one of its vessel traffic service (VTS) centers in the town of Vardø, Norway. The fleet of tugboats, controlled by the VTS center operators, patrols the coastline to hook-up with any potential drifting oil tanker in the region of interest, before it runs ashore. Presently, the tugboats are controlled manually, which is not only challenging but less effective. In this paper, we develop two alternative binary integer programming models that give better tugboat policies in less computational time compared to previous work. Promising results with historical data illustrate great potential for optimal environmental risk reduction along the northern coast of Norway