The vessel allocation problem is a special case of the general vehicle allocation problem for Maritime. The problem is to select the most suitable vessels and to allocate the cargo along different routes among them so as to minimise total renting and distribution cost. We are solving VAP with an innovative, industry focused, cloud-based vessel allocation decision support system that is user friendly, greener and smarter which will eliminate the need to use devious, time consuming and error prone existing commercial solutions.
CLOUD-VAS considers for the first time fuel emission as an explicit objective to optimise alongside cost. This is a novel aspect of the project to address one of the major challenges of maritime transportation to reduce its environmental impact. The work proposed in this proposal will reduce environmental impact of maritime shipping in Europe and contributes to the transition of Europe to a low carbon economy. Besides the general focus point of the market of reducing vessel chartering costs an important point of attention is the reduction of the mentioned GHG. Not only are ship owners forced by regulations but they are ‘pushed’ by organisations like the Clean Cargo Working Group as well to optimise their engines and other operational processes in order to minimise their GHG emissions.
The only Cloud-Based solution in the market : the market in which CLOUD-VAS operates can be labelled as a niche thus the existing state-of-the-art solutions are limited to commercial mathematical solvers (COMSOL). Therefore CLOUD-VAS will be the only Cloud-Based solution available in the market where a metaheuristic solver (METSOL) model will be developed and built into a cloud based software platform.
a) No high cost of license, subscription fee instead. Users can use SaaS offerings to test the software before buy it and leads to the growth of costumer base since it allows small and medium enterprises (SME) to use a software.
b) Helps increase volume output or productivity with fewer people, hence the cost per unit, project or product plummets.
c) Different from the traditional model, in SaaS the software (application) is already installed and configured reducing the time spent in installation and configuration.
d) Users will have access anytime, anywhere globalising workforce economically. People worldwide can access the cloud, provided they have an Internet connection.
e) CLOUD-VAS will be developed with implementation of different user access packages preventing unauthorised staff from making alterations often leading to costly mistakes.
