A new approach to reduce transportation costs of petroleum products using the concept of Swap: A case study of Mazut distribution network

Transportation is amongst a country’s infrastructure sectors. Since petroleum and its products have an undeniable role in Iran’s economy, therefore, the transportation of petroleum products is crucial to economy. A decrease in traffic load leads to significant reduction in depreciation of infrastructure,traffic hazards and accidents, air pollution, transport costs and thus promoting the government’s ability to spend the resulted savings in other sectors and export surplus products to neighboring countries. Therefore, in this article with the help of a linear planning model, by comparing the costs of transportingpetroleum products using the concept of Swap trades in two scenarios, we showed that the amount and costs of mentioned transportation would decrease. In the first scenario, the transport costs in the country were calculated in the case of using Swap. While, in the second scenario, these costs were examined in the case of lack of doing swap with a consideration on supplying consumptions of Northern provinces by increasing productions of internal refineries. According to the information of supply and demand and transportation costs of Mazut product, we calculated the transport costs using TORA software andillustrated that implementing the Swap transactions in the country leads to 2% saving annually for the product. Its significant figure shows the necessity of doing Swap transitions.