Modelo multiagentes baseado em um protocolo de leilões simultâneos para aplicação no problema de planejamento de transferências de produtos no segmento downstream do sistema logístico brasileiro de petróleo

Abstract

The Brazilian oil supply chain is composed by oil refineries, consumer markets, terminals for intermediary storage and several transportation modals, such as pipelines, ships, trucks and trains. The transportation planning of oil products in this multimodal network is a complex problem that is currently performed manually based on expertise, for a period of three months, due to the lack of a software system to cover the problem complexity. Such problem involves the negotiation of available resources such as oil products, tanks and transportation modals between different sources and consumption points. Similar problems, but more directed to the planning of single modes of transportation, have been treated by different approaches, mainly mathematical programming. Such works illustrate the difficult task of modeling large problems with this mechanism. Generally, they consider a short horizon planning or only part of the original problem, such as a part of the network, rendering important limitations to the models developed. Due to the characteristics of the problem in study where the full network needs to be considered and there exists negotiation amongst the different entities involved, the usage of multi-agent models seems to be worth to explore. Such models have been applied in different contexts such as to supply chain problems due its natural correspondence with the reality. Furthermore, in problems involving competition for resources, multi-agents negotiation mechanisms based on auctions are commonly applied. Thus, this thesis presents one auction-based solution formed by the cooperation among agents for them to achieve their goals. The agents involved in the auctions represent mainly the production, storage and consumption locations. Their goal is to maintain a daily suitable inventory level for each product by means of transportation through the multimodal network at a low transport cost. Finally, this paper presents the satisfaction of these objectives through experiments on real and fictional scenarios of Brazilian oil network.