Abstract
Olefin plants employ multi-type cracking furnaces in parallel to convert various hydrocarbon feeds into products such as ethylene and propylene. The cracking process of each furnace is a performance-decaying batch operation, which needs periodic shutdowns for decoking operations and thus involves inherently frequent upsets to downstream process. Therefore, the furnace feed allocation, batch processing time and decoking sequence of the entire furnace system must be optimally scheduled to maximize the plant profitability; meanwhile, the induced upset of the main product yields also needs to be restricted within an appropriate range at any time for the sake of the plant operability. Facing this challenge, a new MILP (mixed-integer linear programming) model has been developed in this paper for the upset-conscious scheduling of cracking furnace systems. The study can not only benefit both profitability and operability for the entire olefin plant operation, but also be applied to other continuous parallel-process and performance-decaying unit systems. The efficacy of the developed scheduling model has been demonstrated by various case studies.
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