New Tools for the Detailed Scheduling of Refined Products Pipelines

摘要

New tools for efficiently generating the detailed schedule of a pipeline system conveying multiple oil products from a single origin to several destinations are presented. They permit to refine the aggregate pipeline schedule provided by continuous-time optimization approaches. We propose a continuous-time mixed-integer linear programming formulation to find the detailed pipeline schedule that minimizes the total cost of shutting-down and restarting flows in pipeline segments over the planning horizon. Besides, a novel heuristic algorithm running on a discrete-event simulation framework is also developed. The performance of the proposed rigorous and heuristic approaches are compared by applying them to a real world pipeline system.