Modeling and simulation as support for decisions makers in petrochemical logistics

Current economy is changing really fast because of some different reasons: the globalization of markets, new arising economies like China and Latin America accessing new resources with new pricing policies as well as the world crisis that has driven down the demand in most western countries. The importance of logistics, due to these aspects, is growing in all industrial fields and obviously also the maritime logistics is strongly affected by these aspects. In this scenario, characterized by big changes, enterprises need to be careful in taking decision and simulation is one of the best ways for supporting companies in analyzing data and finding effective and innovative solutions to increase production capability and to save more money. The proposed research is focused on petrochemical logistics. The authors present a new approach based on Modeling and Simulation (M&S), in order to face maritime logistics problems and to support decisions maker in evaluating different alternatives and strategies with particular attention to fleets management and ports sequencing in ship missions (Bruzzone et al., 2004). The research highlights benefits and advantages of the Simulation use as support for decisions making in term of resources management, time and costs optimization and savings evaluation. The authors develop conceptual models for petrochemical logistic network, by analyzing the related problems and proposing a simulation based approach to identify innovative solutions and strategies. In particular they propose the simulator MARLON (MARitime LOgistic Network), that is devoted to support decisions makers in ship costs evaluation in different scenarios by taking into account stochastic variables (such as weather condition during the navigation) that have influence on navigation time, load/unload operations time as well as ship and missions costs.