Optimisation-based algorithm for refinery short-term scheduling of crude-oil

A short-term schedule for oil refinery should detail all the activities for the entire scheduling process, leading to a complex problem. There is a lack of efficient techniques and software tools for its solution applicable to industrial oil refinery. An optimisation-based algorithm is proposed in this paper with methods to obtain global optimal or near-optimal solutions for this hybrid system. This solution approach benefits from a hybrid automaton model describing the hybrid system and using an algorithm based on the hybrid model to obtain a feasible solution. In order to solve the crude-oil scheduling, the hybrid model we introduce utilises techniques to dynamically improve uniform overage of the solution space. As evidenced by experimental results, this approach has been successfully applied.