marine inventory-routing problem for liquefied natural gas under travel time uncertainty

In this paper we developed an uncertain lng marine inventory-routing problem. for this purpose, we set a scenario for a hypothetical lng manufacturer in iran selling products in long-term and spot contracts. the purpose of the study was to compare shipping expenses of split and non-split delivery strategies in deterministic and uncertain situations. the objective function was to minimize total costs consisting operational costs, contract penalties, and spot fees regarding liquefaction port operational constraints, ship flows, customer and contractual constraints. considering uncertainty in the problem is one of this paper's contributions which is modeled by assuming vessels speed a fuzzy parameter. as a solution method, we propose a metaheuristic that combines a heuristic with ga. according to the computational results, split delivery policy is only cost effective in the deterministic problem, hence split delivery is not recommended in maritime transportation with uncertain nature.