A State of the Art of the LNG Supply Chain Models: a Quest for an Optimum Model Fitting the Inter-Islands Distribution in an Archipelago Country

The recent development of LNG technology and innovations had made up the trades to possibly arrive at places where pipelines could never reach. Natural gas is an important type of energy to bridge out towards a cleaner and more sustainable type of energy in years to come. It is relatively cleaner than other hydrocarbons. There are potential hindrances in improving the LNG distribution system, mostly due to its complexity such as price volatility, unstable demand, non-uniform distributions, availability of supporting facilities, trade distance, potential disruptions to the whole chains and other geographical constraints, etc. A comprehensive review over the research literature in field study of Modelling LNG supply chain that has been done so far is required to build up a knowledge foundation for the advancement of the LNG logistics and distribution optimization model. It is aimed to find out the most suitable model that is well representing the inter-islands distribution condition in an archipelago country, came with its all challenges and complexities. In order to achieve such a purpose, the systematic literature review is designed by observing parameters that have jointly formed an LNG distribution system from a few different angles. This review involves investigation of over 60 papers by a close look observation from the initial filtered up to 160 paper articles published in a few database sources throughout the period of 2010–2020. It reveals the fact that only a few research works have been done in exploring the domain area of the LNG distribution system with the basis of the inter-islands distribution model, thus the topic is considered relatively under-explored.