Flexible scheduling model of crude oil operations under crude supply disturbance

Today's changeable market and resultant disturbance of crude oil supply require agile and flexible scheduling of crude oil operation. The objective of flexible scheduling is to keep stable crude oil operation and satisfy production demands under the circumstances of supply disturbance. In this paper, a new mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) formulation is set up for crude oil scheduling firstly, and then some heuristic rules worked out by some experts are proposed to linearize bilinear terms and prefix some binary variables in the MINLP model. These rules not only reduce the complexity of the MINLP model, but also can be used to solve the scheduling problems in various conditions. In case study, the new model with heuristic rules and the best models reported in the literature are compared and evaluated in three benchmark examples in the normal situation, and then three abnormal situations of supply delay are considered based on the new approach. The results of case study show that the new flexible approach can handle crude oil scheduling problems efficiently in both normal and abnormal conditions. © 2009 Science in China Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH.