OPERATIONAL LOGISTICS OF THE WORLD OIL TANKER FLEET: A SIMULATION MODELING APPROACH FOR EMERGENCY ENERGY MANAGEMENT

The stimulus for this research is the belief that the International Energy Agency (IEA) would be better able to plan for and implement its Emergency Oil Sharing Plan (EOSP) if it modeled important aspects of the world oil economy from an operational point of view. This belief is based on the observations that the behavior of tankers and ports are important characteristics affecting the success of EOSP-based cooperation schemes; that this behavior has received little attention in most modeling efforts; and that no model focuses on this behavior internationally in a way that provides useful performance measures for comparing the operational consequences of hypothetical patterns of trade.;Model use is demonstrated with a pair of hypothetical runs, a Base Case and Scenario. The Base Case considers a portion of the world's crude-hauling tankers operating among IEA nations and members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for one year. The Scenario alters the Base Case trade pattern by representing a hypothetical cessation of Iranian exports due to the Iran/Iraq war and an IEA-EOSP sponsored increase in Saudi Arabian exports in response. High levels of trade are simulated using 1978 trade data. Model outputs by port and tanker class revealed increases in port throughput times.;The importance of operational information to the functioning of the world oil economy was demonstrated in 1973, a posteriori. A model like TANKSIM is shown to generate information of use in evaluating similar situations, a priori.;A tanker simulation (TANKSIM) model is offered as a prototype to produce performance measures that may be used in investigating the adequacy and responsiveness of the world's ports and tankers to various patterns of trade. TANKSIM is a SLAM-based, discrete-event simulation model that tracks the movements of tankers worldwide and compiles information on the fleet disposition and status and port and vessel operating characteristics associated with an input trade pattern. Any pattern of crude oil trade whether historical, prescribed, or predicted, may be used to drive the model. A flexible model structure enables a user to investigate the behavior of any configuration of nations, ports, and tanker types.