Abstract
In the fuel supply facilities where fuels are unloaded from tankers to tanks and supplied through pipelines, reducing the number of valve operations is important to improve the efficiency of facility utilization. This is a combinatorial optimization problem that asks to minimize the number of changing the assignment patterns of tank groups to berths. We propose here an effective heuristic algorithm which exploits the special structure of the problem. Computational results indicate that this can be used as a scheduler in real-world supply facilities.
