A Holistic MILP Model for Scheduling and Inventory Management of a Multiproduct Oil Distribution System

H. Mostafaei, P.M. Castro, S. Relvas, I. Harjunkoski
ABSTRACT:

This paper addresses the optimal scheduling of an oil transportation system characterized by a straight multiproduct pipeline featuring multiple input and output nodes, where products are dispatched to local markets often by tanker trucks. We present a new continuous-time mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that is designed based on real-world necessities and that requires significantly fewer binary variables than previous work. As main contributions, the model: i) can rigorously avoid forbidden product sequences in every pipeline segment; ii) considers filler batch constraints to avoid large contamination volumes; and iii) includes inventory management constraints in the different pipeline nodes. We first use an illustrative example before testing the approach with a new large-scale example problem and three real-world cases from the literature. Results show that the proposed model has a tight linear programming (LP) relaxation and is very efficient computationally. It is thus a significant contribution to the state-of-the-art.

Publisher
Omega (Published)
Date
Aug, 2019
Keywords
Mathematical modeling | Scheduling | MILP | Continuous-time | Multiproduct pipeline | Inventory management

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