Exxonmobil Research and Engineering Company

Sangbum Lee

Kevin C Furman

Vikas Goel

Amr S El-Bakry

Jin-Hwa Song

Federico D Carvallo

Benny S Budiman

Marcel R Mueller

James Dreher

Aristides Miroyannis

Chris P Kramer

Richard Perry Connell

Laura L Locke

A method of generating capacity, production and inventory plans, over a designated planning horizon, which will optimize, with respect to a designated performance index, the operations of one or more bulk product blending and packaging plants and a specified number, ranging from zero to a certain count, of distribution centers while meeting key operating constraints. Also decision making tools and computer implemented programs for performing the method.

Method and apparatus for optimizing a performance index of a bulk product blending and packaging plant

The present invention is a computational system to generate feasible marine transportation schedules given a proposed bulk material supply chain. The decision support tool will fulfill the objectives and scope defined above. The technology employed will require (a) the use of mathematical programming modeling techniques (mixed integer linear programming) to mathematically formulate the business problem, and (b) advanced proprietary solution methods to produce solutions satisfying all constraints of the mathematical model while optimizing an objective function. The decision support tool has the following capabilities: Read input data, Generate feasible bulk material ship Schedule, Evaluate bulk material ship Schedule with User-defined Objective Function, Allow Case comparison, Graphical user interface (GUI) for specifying input data and displaying results.

Bulk material ship routing and inventory management schedule optimization

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Centreville, VA, United States of America

Sangbum Lee