Flexible Scheduling of Crude Oil Inventory Management

This work presents a novel approach for crude oil inventory management of a refinery. Considered problems involve the uncertainty in the crude oil availability, its transfer to storage tanks and charging schedule for each crude oil mixture to crude distillation units. In this paper a solution algorithm is used that iteratively solves two mixed-integer linear programming models and a nonlinear programming model. The proposed model incorporates the uncertainty issue in the availability of Crude oil and an improved discrete-time-based formulation is developed to provide good quality solutions and also saves the computational efforts. An algorithm is proposed to provide a solution space instead of a single point Solution that may help to minimize the loss due to late or early arrival of vessels. A case Study is carried Out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed algorithms.