Pipelines are the most reliable, cost-effective and environmentally friendlytransportation mode, and the preferred transportation option in the oil industry. Batchesof different products are usually shipped from multiple refineries to several downstreamterminals. Most of refined products pipelines are common carriers offering transportservices to many refiners. Previous work on pipeline planning assumed single-sourceconfigurations with only one input terminal at the origin and several receiving depots.However, multiple-source pipeline configurations involving additional input terminalsat non-origin points are quite usual and their operational planning raise new issues notconsidered before. For instance, the sequence of batches will no longer be arranged asthey are pumped into the line because batches can be injected at some intermediatepoints. As a result, product lots and pumping runs must be handled as independententities. Another critical matter is the batch integrity. When a new product is injected atan intermediate point, the pipeline operator is usually forbidden to split a batch in transitinto a pair of non-consecutive smaller lots. The primary goal is to keep the mixing costsas low as possible. This paper presents a new MILP mathematical formulation for theshort-term operational planning of refined products pipelines with multiple input andoutput terminals. It is based on a continuous representation in both time and volumescales. The proposed formulation was successfully applied to a practical example.
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