Abstract
Onshore oil fields may contain hundreds of wells that use sophisticated and complex equipments. These equipments need regular maintenance to keep the wells at maximum productivity. When the productivity of a well decreases, a specially-equipped vehicle called a workover rig must visit this well to restore its full productivity. Given a heterogeneous fleet of workover rigs and a set of wells requiring maintenance, the workover rig routing problem (WRRP) consists of finding rig routes that minimize the total production loss of the wells over a finite horizon. The wells have different loss rates, need different services, and may not be serviced within the horizon. On the other hand, the number of available workover rigs is limited, they have different initial positions, and they do not have the same equipments. This paper presents and compares four heuristics for the WRRP: an existing variable neighborhood search heuristic, a branch-price-and-cut heuristic, an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic, and a hybrid genetic algorithm. These heuristics are tested on practical-sized instances involving up to 300 wells, 10 rigs on a 350-period horizon. Our computational results indicate that the hybrid genetic algorithm outperforms the other heuristics on average and in most cases.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aloise, D.J., Aloise, D., Rocha, C.T.M., Ribeiro, C.C., Ribeiro Filho, J.C., Moura, L.S.S.: Scheduling workover rigs for onshore oil production. Discrete Appl. Math. 154(5), 695–702 (2006)
Baldacci, R., Mingozzi, A., Roberti, R.: New route relaxation and pricing strategies for the vehicle routing problem. Oper. Res. 59(5), 1263–1283 (2011)
Barnhart, C., Johnson, E.L., Nemhauser, G.L., Savelsbergh, M.W.P., Vance, P.H.: Branch-and-price: Column generation for solving huge integer programs. Oper. Res. 46(3), 316–329 (1998)
Costa, L.R.: Solving the workover rigs routing problem. Master’s thesis, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2005)
Costa, L.R., Ferreira Filho, V.J.M.: A heuristic of dynamic mounting for the workover rigs routing problem. In: Proceedings of XXXVII SBPO Brazilian Symposium on Operations Research, pp. 2176–2187 (2005)
Desaulniers, G., Lessard, F., Hadjar, A.: Tabu search, partial elementarity, and generalized \(k\)-path inequalities for the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Transp. Sci. 42(3), 387–404 (2008)
Desrosiers, J., Lübbecke, M.E.: Branch-price-and-cut algorithms. In: Cochran, J.J., Cox Jr, L.A., Keskinocak, P., Kharoufeh, J.P., Smith, J.C. (eds.) Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, vol. 8. Wiley, New York, NY (2010)
Duhamel, C., Santos, A.C., Gueguen, L.M.: Models and hybrid methods for the onshore wells maintenance problem. Comput. Oper. Res. 39(12), 2944–2953 (2012)
Hansen, P., Mladenović, N.: Variable neighborhood search. In: Glover, F., Kochenberger, G. (eds.) Handbook of Metaheuristics, pp. 145–184. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell (2003)
Jepsen, M., Petersen, B., Spoorendonk, S., Pisinger, D.: Subset-row inequalities applied to the vehicle-routing problem with time windows. Oper. Res. 56(2), 497–511 (2008)
Kruskal, J.B.: On the shortest spanning subtree of a graph and the traveling salesman problem. In: Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, American Mathematical Society, pp. 48–50 (1956)
Lübbecke, M.E., Desrosiers, J.: Selected topics in column generation. Oper. Res. 53(6), 1007–1023 (2005)
Mladenović, N., Hansen, P.: Variable neighborhood search. Comput. Oper. Res. 24(11), 1097–1100 (1997)
Neves, T.A.: Heuristics with adaptive memory applied to workover rig routing and scheduling problem. Master’s thesis, Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil (2007)
Pacheco, A.V.F., Ribeiro, G.M., Mauri, G.R.: A GRASP with path-relinking for the workover rig scheduling problem. Int. J. Nat. Comput. Res. 1(2), 1–14 (2010)
Prins, C.: A simple and effective evolutionary algorithm for the vehicle routing problem. Comput. Oper. Res. 31(12), 1985–2002 (2004)
Ribeiro, G.M., Desaulniers, G., Desrosiers, J.: A branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the workover rig routing problem. Comput. Oper. Res. 39(12), 3305–3315 (2012)
Ribeiro, G.M., Laporte, G., Mauri, G.R.: A comparison of three metaheuristics for the workover rig routing problem. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 220(1), 28–38 (2012)
Ribeiro, G.M., Mauri, G.R., Lorena, L.A.N.: A simple and robust simulated annealing algorithm for scheduling workover rigs on onshore oil fields. Comput. Industrial Eng. 60(4), 519–526 (2011)
Ropke, S., Pisinger, D.: A unified heuristic for a large class of vehicle routing problems with backhauls. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 171(3), 750–775 (2006)
Sahni, S., Gonzalez, T.: P-complete approximation problems. J. ACM 23(3), 555–565 (1976)
Shaw, P.: A new local search algorithm providing high quality solutions to vehicle routing problems. Technical Report, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (1997)
Silva, M.M., Subramanian, A., Vidal, T., Ochi, L.S.: A simple and effective metaheuristic for the minimum latency problem. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 221(3), 513–520 (2012)
Toth, P., Vigo, D.: The granular tabu search and its application to the vehicle-routing problem. INFORMS J. Comput. 15(4), 333–346 (2003)
Tsitsiklis, J.N.: Special cases of traveling salesman and repairman problems with time windows. Networks 22(3), 263–282 (1992)
Vidal, T., Crainic, T.G., Gendreau, M., Lahrichi, N., Rei, W.: A hybrid genetic algorithm for multidepot and periodic vehicle routing problems. Oper. Res. 60(3), 611–624 (2012)
Vidal, T., Crainic, T.G., Gendreau, M., Prins, C.: Heuristics for multi-attribute vehicle routing problems: a survey and synthesis. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 231(1), 1–21 (2014)
Vidal, T., Crainic, T.G., Gendreau, M., Prins, C.: A unified solution framework for multi-attribute vehicle routing problems. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 234(3), 658–673 (2014)
Acknowledgments
Glaydston Mattos Ribeiro acknowledges the Espírito Santo Research Foundation and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development for their financial support. Guy Desaulniers and Jacques Desrosiers acknowledge the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada for its financial support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix: Detailed results
Appendix: Detailed results
In this appendix, we report the detailed results of our computational experiments that were summarized in Tables 1, 2, 3, and 4. There is one table per parameter combination (\(|W|,\,|K|,\,H\)). In each table, the first column specifies the instance number (out of 10 instances). The next column indicates the best-known solution value (BKUB). Out of these 80 upper bounds, 66 correspond to optimal solutions provided by the exact BPC algorithm of Ribeiro et al. (2012) and 14 are new best-known values (in bold face) obtained by HGA and reasserted by ALNS (5) and BPC (4). For each heuristic, the tables report four columns (only three for BPC): best solution value found over all runs (Best), average solution value (Avg), average computational time in seconds (Time), and the average solution value deviation with respect to BKUB in percentage (Dev) computed as \(\hbox {Dev} = 100 \times \left( \hbox {BKUB} - \hbox {Avg} \right) /\hbox {BKUB}.\)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ribeiro, G.M., Desaulniers, G., Desrosiers, J. et al. Efficient heuristics for the workover rig routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet and a finite horizon. J Heuristics 20, 677–708 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-014-9262-1
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-014-9262-1