Abstract
<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> There are varieties of constraints for a short-term scheduling problem of crude oil operations in a refinery. These constraints are difficult to model and complicate the short-term scheduling problem. Among them, oil residency time and high fusion point crude oil transportation constraints are the challenging ones. With high setup cost for high fusion point oil transportation, it is desired that the volume of high fusion point oil can be transported as much as possible by a single setup. This may result in late transportation of other types of crude oil, leading to the violation of crude oil residency time constraint. These constraints are ignored by existing methods in the literature. To solve this problem, this paper studies the problem in a control theory perspective by viewing an operation decision in the schedule as a control. With this idea, the system is modeled by a hybrid Petri net. With this model and tank grouping strategy, schedulability analysis is carried out and schedulability conditions are presented with tank charging and discharging costs being taken into consideration. These conditions are necessary for determining a refining schedule and can be used to check whether a target-refining schedule is realizable or not. If so, a feasible detailed schedule for the refining schedule can be easily obtained by creating the operation decisions one by one. </para>
Highlights
A S IT can greatly increase profit if a plant is well operated [12], great attention has been paid to the development of effective techniques for the operations of refinery in the past years
The contribution of this paper includes: 1) it is the first time that high fusion point crude oil is considered in scheduling crude oil operations; 2) a hybrid PN model is developed to describe such a system; 3) schedulability conditions are presented; 4) with the schedulability conditions, one can derive how much high fusion point crude oil can be transported from storage tanks to charging tanks, which is important in scheduling such systems; and 5) with them, one can find a detailed feasible one given a realizable refining schedule
With the PN model developed in the last section, this section analyzes the schedulability and the amount of high fusion point oil that can be transported by a single setup based on charging tank grouping
Summary
A S IT can greatly increase profit if a plant is well operated [12], great attention has been paid to the development of effective techniques for the operations of refinery in the. Schedulability conditions are presented that describe the relationship among the number of charging tanks, number of distillers, capacity of charging tanks, production rates, and amount of high fusion point oil that can be transported by a single setup These conditions provide the base for finding a refining schedule and checking the realizability of a given one. The contribution of this paper includes: 1) it is the first time that high fusion point crude oil is considered in scheduling crude oil operations; 2) a hybrid PN model is developed to describe such a system; 3) schedulability conditions are presented; 4) with the schedulability conditions, one can derive how much high fusion point crude oil can be transported from storage tanks to charging tanks, which is important in scheduling such systems; and 5) with them, one can find a detailed feasible one given a realizable refining schedule.
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