Research On Fleet Deployment For Carrying Oil In China

With the rapid growth of the national economy, China's demand of energy, especially demand of crude oil has increased dramatically in the past thirty years. However, the domestic production can not meet the increasing demand, and the huge gap between supply and demand can only be offset by import crude oil. A very large proportion of the imports are by means of oceanic transportation. With the increase of crude oil imports and the implementation of the 'oil security' strategy, the Chinese oil tanker fleet are facing a good opportunity of development. The tanker companies also realize the significance of the reasonable fleet deployment to enhance their power.The first chapter of this thesis looked back at the outcomes on fleet deployment research both theoretically and practically. Based on this, the auther decide that the research object of this thesis will be the crude oil tanker fleet deployment using the linear programming and the dynamic programming.Next, the thesis analyzed the situation of our import market both on supply and demand, including factors which may influence the transportation market, forecast on the crude oil imports, current situation on the tanker fleet both domestic and abroad. By forecast, the general trend of the oil imports could be concluded; by analyzing the tanker fleet, the development direction of our tanker fleet could be achieved. Based on the freight volume on each course, we decided the scale of our tanker fleet by linear programming.Then the author established a dynamic programming model to decide on how to buy and rent tankers on the basis of a fixed fleet scale, which is the core of the whole thsis. Under the assumptions defined in the paper, the author gave a model aiming at minimizing the whole costs as the objection, and by solving the model, the detailed strategy could be achieved. An example was also gave as an illustration of the model and the optimized strategy was concluded.