Robust scheduling of crude oil operations under demand and ship arrival uncertainty

Abstract

Scheduling of crude oil operations is an important and complex routine task in a refinery. It involves crude oil unloading, tank allocation, storage and blending of crudes, and CDU charging. The deterministic MILP approach of Reddy et al. was modified to address uncertainties in crude operations, i.e., product demand and ship arrival uncertainties. Scenario-based models for addressing demand and ship arrival uncertainties separately were developed. For demand uncertainty, the schedule obtained was more robust and more feasible than the average-demand schedule over the entire expected range of uncertainty. For ship arrival uncertainty, an approximate decomposition strategy in which each scenario is solved independently; the nominal scenario is then solved by maximizing the expected profit and penalizing schedule changes to other scenarios. The resulting schedules were superior to the original schedules. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2006 AIChE Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA 11/12-17/2006).