Tools for the Detailed Scheduling of Refined Products Pipelines

V. CAFARO; D. CAFARO; C.A. MÉNDEZ; J. CERDÁ

Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering, 29

elsevier

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2011; p. 985 - 989

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