This paper addresses the crude-oil short-term scheduling problem, which is the firststage of the crude-oil refining process. The problem involves crude-oil unloading frommarine vessels to storage tanks, transfers and mixings in charging tanks, and a chargingschedule for each crude-oil mixture to the crude distillation units. Previous work on thisproblem includes discrete-time and continuous-time formulations. In this paper, wepresent a new continuous-time model that is based on the idea of postulating a potentialnumber of tasks, which simplifies both the formulation and the application to crude-oilscheduling problems. The proposed formulation results in a non-convex mixed-integernonlinear programming model (MINLP) which is solved using a two stagedecomposition procedure. The algorithm converges quickly within a small (<5%)optimality gap as is illustrated with the four case-studies.
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