Abstract
Oil product pipelines have features such as transporting multiple materials, ever-changing operating conditions, and synchronism between the oil input plan and the oil offloading plan. In this paper, an optimal model was established for a single-source multi-distribution oil product pipeline, and scheduling plans were made based on supply. In the model, time node constraints, oil offloading plan constraints, and migration of batch constraints were taken into consideration. The minimum deviation between the demanded oil volumes and the actual offloading volumes was chosen as the objective function, and a linear programming model was established on the basis of known time nodes’ sequence. The ant colony optimization algorithm and simplex method were used to solve the model. The model was applied to a real pipeline and it performed well.
Highlights
17.95 million barrels of oil products are imported and exported everyday around the world (BP 2014), most of which are transported to different cities by pipelines
An optimal model was established for a single-source multi-distribution oil product pipeline, and scheduling plans were made based on supply
Due to the limit of the offloading flow rate, the offloading volume within any time-window should not be larger than that of the maximum offloading flow rate multiplied by the length of the time-window or less than that of the minimum offloading flow rate multiplied by the length of the time-window
Summary
17.95 million barrels of oil products are imported and exported everyday around the world (BP 2014), most of which are transported to different cities by pipelines. On the basis of the previous research, Cafaro et al (2015) established a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model and made a detailed scheduling plan for a real monophyletic pipeline, considering the hydraulic coupling nonlinear constraint. The current continuous-time expression MILP model ignores the time nodes such as batches’ arrival and batch delivery operation’s starting and ending moment, which will inevitably bring about uneconomical operating period distribution and excessive time-window offset.
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