Effective methods for petroleum tank truck dispatching

Abstract Two methods are described for dispatching and sequencing petroleum tank trucks used in the pickup and delivery of crude oil. The problem is similar to the multi-terminal vehicle dispatch problem except that each pickup at a well site must be followed by a delivery to an acceptable collection terminal. A greedy-type algorithm is developed which is efficient for real-time dispatching. A subproblem optimization approach is also presented and computational results on test problems are reported. Lower bound calculations indicate that solution quality is often within 10% of optimality.