Pipelines are the most reliable, cost-effective and environmentally friendly transportation mode, and the preferred transportation option in the oil industry. Batches of different products are usually shipped from multiple refineries to several downstream terminals. Most of refined products pipelines are common carriers offering transport services to many refiners. Previous work on pipeline planning assumed single-source configurations with only one input terminal at the origin and several receiving depots. However, multiple-source pipeline configurations involving additional input terminals at non-origin points are quite usual and their operational planning raise new issues not considered before. For instance, the sequence of batches will no longer be arranged as they are pumped into the line because batches can be injected at some intermediate points. As a result, product lots and pumping runs must be handled as independent entities. Another critical matter is the batch integrity. When a new product is injected at an intermediate point, the pipeline operator is usually forbidden to split a batch in transit into a pair of non-consecutive smaller lots. The primary goal is to keep the mixing costs as low as possible. This paper presents a new MILP mathematical formulation for the short-term operational planning of refined products pipelines with multiple input and output terminals. It is based on a continuous representation in both time and volume scales. The proposed formulation was successfully applied to a practical example.
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