Integrated Scheduling for Petroleum Refinery Supply-Chain Management

The petroleum refinery supply-chain is a leading segment over the oil industry-wide supply-chain, covering the plant-wide petroleum refinery scheduling sub problem and the multi oil-product pipeline distribution sub problem. These sectors along the petroleum refinery supply-chain are highly correlated, since the output of refinery processing sub system is the input to the product distribution sub system. The oil companies are aiming at maximizing the profit margin by weighing benefits versus costs throughout the entire refinery supply-chain. According to Chima (2007), there is a need to ensure that each sector along the supply-chain can respond quickly to the exact demand of its downstream customers, protecting itself from problems with suppliers and buffering its operations from the demand and supply uncertainty it faces. Thus, it can greatly maximize the potential benefit margin by coordinating the management and operations of the two sub problems along the refinery supply-chain. There exists a lot of works explicitly and deeply exploited and studied these sectors separately, while only a few works addressed the sectors along the petroleum refinery supply-chain simultaneously. Guyonnet et al. (2009) integrated the crude oil unloading, production planning, and distribution sub models on a tactical decision level by solving each part in a sequential push or pull manner, where the planning horizon is discretized into time periods, typically a day or a week. Siwi et al. (2018) proposed a strategical planning of the petroleum and petrochemical supply chain. However, systematic studies for the integrated scheduling of these sectors are still lacking.

This work is aiming at realizing the holistic scheduling and optimization of the petroleum refinery supply-chain. Crude oil unloading, transferring, manufacturing, and oil-product distribution systems are integrated optimized. The scheduling objective is to minimize the total operating cost; meanwhile, operating rules (including newly considered operating rules in Yu et al. (2020), such as tank receiving and discharging operations cannot be performed simultaneously, which can further close the gap between the modeling and the realistic problem), and requirement specifications for crude oil blending and oil product blending (where nonlinearity may occurs due to the blending operation), inventory limits, delivery feasibility constraints and oil product demands must be satisfied, which may result in a large-scale MINLP model. The efficacy of the developed integrated scheduling model is demonstrated by an industrial-scale case study.

Keywords: Integrated scheduling, MINLP, Petroleum refinery supply-chain, Crude unloading, Refinery manufacturing, Multi oil-product, Pipeline distribution

References

Guyonnet, P., Grant, F.H., Bagajewicz, M.J. (2009). Integrated Model for Refinery Planning, Oil Procuring, and Product Distribution. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 48: 463–482

Siwi, R. G., Aljumah, F., Li, J., & Xao, X. (2018). Optimal Strategic Planning of Integrated Petroleum and Petrochemical Supply Chain. In Computer Aided Chemical Engineering (Vol. 43, pp. 1201-1206). Elsevier.

Tong, K., Feng, Y., Rong, G. (2012). Integrated Model for Refinery Production and Pipeline System Scheduling. Proceedings of the 22nd European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering, 17 - 20 June 2012, London.

Yu, L., Chen, M., & Xu, Q. (2020). Simultaneous Scheduling of Multi-product Pipeline Distribution and Depot Inventory Management for Petroleum Refineries. Chemical Engineering Science, 115618.