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.20113510381063). The novelty of the present work relies on how to accurately
impose lower and upper bounds on the flow rate of multiple tank outputs
given that the formulation is based on a unit-specific time grid.
Two approaches are proposed and evaluated. The resulting MINLP models
are exhaustively tested with six distinguishing real-world scenarios
in which blending can include up to 36 crude oil grades, different
tank availability, initial inventories, and scheduled parcels to arrive
at the refinery. Two solution algorithms that avoid solving the full-scale
MINLP problem are used and compared. The computational experiments
show that the proposed formulations are able to handle a wide range
of problem instances in reasonable computational time, despite of
the size dimension.
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