Integrated Digital Planning

SIRIUS’ planning project started by developing a case study that looked at vessel movements and cargo transport in the North Sea. The goal was to improve the workflow of planners at Equinor by providing a better overview of the bottlenecks that could delay overall progress, the load on different vessels, and the quality of their logistics operations.

The first phase of the project used Real-time ABS as a modelling language to simulate and visualize the actual logistics operations, based on two months of logistics data provided by Equinor. This initial case study already illustrated the general usefulness of Real-time ABS modelling, beyond the realm of computing systems. The prototype already allowed the user to browse container lists for containers loaded to an offshore installation, or loaded on a vessel at a specific time, and from there track the container’s content back to work orders.

A second step aimed to combine these simulations with stronger analyses to generate solutions and verify their correctness with respect to requirements such as resource restrictions, safety regulations, and space limitations. There were promising early results in analysing the operational data using SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) and OMT (Optimization Modulo Theories) techniques – we managed to automatically locate errors and ambiguities in the provided data by checking against its expected logical structure, and to calculate maximum values for various parameters.

Challenges

Data Access: the research is necessarily carried out using confidential data provided by an industry partner; thus, identifying and getting access to data sets in appropriate and documented formats slowed down research work.
Publications: publishing technical and methodological work, as undertaken in this project, entails making the used data set available, which is problematic for confidential data.
Data Quality and Availability: Optimizations such as carried out during the project require exact historical data, which usually has no operational value and might not have been flawlessly recorded, or not at all. Some data attributes (e.g., physical dimensions of cargo) were unavailable.

Our Approach

The approach was two-fold:

Design a simulation and visualization prototype using Real-Time ABS. The prototype allowed interactive browsing of cargo activity wrt on- and offshore installations and vessels.
Convert cargo and vessel movement data into logical propositions amenable as input to SMT- and OMT-solvers. Use this data, together with logical consistency and/or optimization conditions to automatically find optimal cargo assignments, logical inconsistencies, etc.

Results

The results were demonstrated in SIRIUS-internal fora, e.g. during general assemblies and large and small meetings.

Team

SIRIUS:

Rudolf Schlatte, Chi Mai Nguyen, Einar Broch Johnsen, Violet Pun

Equinor:

Leif André Sneen-Arlie

Partners

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access (Research Council of Norway, project 237889).