Dealing with Multiple Tank Outflows and In-Line Blending in Continuous-Time Crude Oil Scheduling Problems

Abstract

The crude oil scheduling problem has been focus of many studies in the past, which is justified by its importance in the oil industry. Optimizing crude oil blending is of paramount importance given that it can substantially impact the economic performance of a refinery. In this work, operational features of a real-world existing refinery are addressed. Only operations limited to the refinery battery are in scope such as splitting of parcels unloaded from a supplying pipeline segment, tank heels and capacities, brine settling time, multiquality tracking, crude distillation unit (CDU) straight-run products profile, multiple tank outputs, and multiple CDU inputs. Moreover, different policies as to the handling of the refinery tank farm are evaluated. The presented formulation is taking from the multioperation sequencing (MOS) proposed by Mouret, Grossmann, and Pestiaux ( Comput. Chem. Eng. 2011, 35, 1038−1063. DOI: 10.1016/j.compchemeng.2010.07.007). The novelty of the present work relies on how to accuratel...