Reactive Scheduling of Short-Term Crude Oil Operations under Uncertainties

Abstract

In this paper, an effective reactive scheduling methodology for short-term crude oil operations has been developed to manage crude movements from ship unloading to distillation processing under various uncertainties. It contains a two-stage solving procedure for handling uncertainties such as shipping delay, crude mixture demand change, and tank unavailability. On the first stage, a deterministic schedule is initially obtained based on a continuous-time global event model using nominal data provided/projected at the beginning of each scheduling time horizon. On the second stage, indicator binary variables are implemented respectively under any occurrence of different uncertainties to collect information from the current deterministic schedule through defining “executed” tasks. On the basis of the information, rescheduling models are configured correspondingly under diverse uncertainty scenarios by combining the first-stage scheduling model and amendment constraints associated with those “executed” tasks. ...