Refinery production planning and scheduling: the refining core business

Abstract

-Intelligent production planning and scheduling are of paramount importance to ensure refinery profitability, logistic reliability and safety at the local and corporate levels. In Brazil, such activities play a particularly critical role, since the Brazilian downstream model is moving towards a demand-driven model rather than a supply-driven one. Moreover, new and specialized non-linear constraints are continuously being incorporated into these large-scale problems: increases in oil prices implying the need for processing poor quality crudes, increasing demand and new demand patterns for petroleum products, new stringent environmental regulations related to clean fuels and start-up of new production technologies embedded into more complex refining schemes. This paper aims at clarifying the central role of refinery planning and scheduling activities in the Petrobras refining business. Major past and present results are outlined and corporate long-term strategies to deal with present and future challenges are presented.

Lessons learned from developing and implementing refinery production scheduling technologies

“…As a result, schedulers will no longer trust the tool and will return to using Excel spreadsheets. Our experience has proven that prompt responses from the business consulting team to the schedulers are crucial (Joly, 2012). At Petrobras, good results were achieved through the implementation of a help desk service through which schedulers talked directly to the BR-SIPP support team.…”

“…Given that RPS is concerned with operational decisions, it has straightforward implications for achieving profitable and, most importantly, safe operation in a business in which humans and the environment are exposed to severe hazards. RPS now represents the refining core business for high-performing oil refineries (Joly, 2012).…”

“…DC: Discrete-continuous optimization (e.g., mixed-integer programming); EBS: Event-based simulation; HB: Heuristic-based optimization; L: Linear optimization; NL: Nonlinear optimization Fig. 1 A real-world hierarchical decision-making framework for refinery automation (Joly, 2012) 2 Lessons learned 2.1 Know the prerequisites of an RPS project An RPS project involves two major work fronts, namely, initial implementation and maintenance over time. A third work front, i.e., technology development, may exist in companies that opt for technological independence from the industrial automation software market.…”

Assessment of Co2 Emission Mitigation for a Brazilian Oil Refinery

“…In this sense, Brazilian refineries must be prepared to cope with new challenges to sustain competitiveness, such as: increases in oil prices and the need for processing poor quality crudes; increasing demand and new demand patterns for petroleum products, including petrochemicals; new Brazilian stringent environmental regulations related to clean fuels; launching of new production technologies (e.g., heavy ends upgrading, product quality improvement, efficient fuel usage, refinery emission control strategies) embedded into more complex refining schemes and subject to increasing complexity of the logistic hardware that interconnects crude oil terminals, refineries, and distribution centers (Joly, 2012).…”

Optimizing scheduling of refinery operations based on piecewise linear models

“…This multi-fixed yield model was adopted in (Luo & Rong, 2007), which also proposed a hierarchical approach to short-term scheduling and significantly reduced the binary variables in optimization. In addition to these specific studies, some excellent reviews have been published in this area (Floudas et al, 2004;Bengtsson et al, 2010;Shah et al, 2010;Joly, 2012;Harjunkoski et al, 2014).…”