The Offshore Maritime Optimization Logistics Workbench is a SINTEF web application - funded by the LowEmission Research Centre and developed through a long-running collaboration with Equinor, that brings periodic and operational supply vessel planning into a single place in the browser.
Two solver engines work side by side under one shell: a tactical engine for weekly route plan construction, based on the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) metaheuristic; and an operational engine for short term planning weather-aware daily routing with speed optimisation.
The tactical engine, MOLO (Maritime Offshore Logistics Optimisation), grew out of the joint work with Equinor; the operational engine, LogOps (Logistics Optimisation for Operational planning), was shaped from needs that surfaced during the same work.
What it does
- Tactical planning. Builds weekly schedules that minimise fleet cost and emissions while honouring visit frequencies, voyage length limits and vessel–installation compatibility. Five solver modes are exposed, from an optimisation run to a manual cost calculation.
- Operational planning. Daily routing under live met.no weather forecasts, with mandatory and optional cargo, recursive per-leg speed optimisation, and per-mode fuel curves (transit / waiting / servicing).
- A scenario for every plan you want to try. Tactical and operational planning each have their own scenario template - similar in shape, tuned to a different planning horizon. Make one scenario or 20: Each is a stand-alone copy you can compare, clone or hand to a colleague. Installations and vessels live in shared archives you build up once and pull from in any scenario.
- Comprehensive output statistics with visualisation. Every finished run is saved with cost, distance, slack, waiting hours and pollutant emissions, and the result view shows the full plan visually - an interactive Leaflet route map, a Gantt-style schedule of every PSV across the planning horizon, and per-day or per-leg detail tables.
- Cloud-hosted, scaled to each user. The Workbench runs in the cloud, so there is nothing to install. A permanent web service handles sign-in, keeps your scenarios, vessels, installations and finished plans safe, and starts the optimisation when you click Run. Each user gets a dedicated optimisation engine - 4 cores and 16 GB of memory - that wakes up when you open the platform and shuts down again when you leave, so cost follows actual use. Live weather is pulled from the met.no ocean forecast for every installation, and vessel power is read at runtime from a fast look-up table built from earlier ShipX simulations.
Application areas
- Offshore O&G logistics - weekly schedules and operational dispatch.
- Fleet performance -what-if studies (vessel mix, departure-day spread, demand-intensive caps).
- Emissions accounting -CO2/ NOx / SOx / PM per produced plan.
Documentation
For an extended technical description - full GUI walkthrough, all settings, solver modes and admin tooling - see the PSV planning Workbench Technical Brochure (PDF).