Vessels,especially very large or ultra large crude carriers(VLCCs or ULCCs),often can only dock and leave the berth during high tide periods to prevent being stranded.Unfortunately,the current crude scheduling models do not take into account tidal conditions,which will seriously affect the feasibility of crude schedule.So we first focus on the docking and leaving operations under the tidal actions,and establish a new hybrid continuous-time mixed integer linear programming(MILP)model which incorporates global event based formulation and unit-specific event based formulation.Upon considering that the multiple blending of crude oil can easily cause the production fluctuating,there are some reasonable assumptions that storage tanks can only store pure crude,and charging tanks just can be refilled after being emptied,which helps us obtain a simple MILP model without composition discrepancy caused by crude blending.Two cases are used to demonstrate the efficacy of proposed scheduling model.The results show that the optimization schedule can minimize the demurrage of the vessels and the number of feeding changeovers of crude oil distillation units(CDUs).
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