Spatial-based decomposition approach for the crude scheduling problem of a refinery with multiple ports and long-distance pipelines

This work addresses the large-scale crude scheduling problem of a real case refinery importing various types of crude oil from two ports via long-distance pipelines. We employ a spatial-based decomposition approach to construct a two-stage model of the practical refinery operations. During the first stage, the refinery plant is treated as a single aggregated demand node to simplify the port sub-problem. Specific receiving and charging operations of the plant sub-problem are then determined in the second stage. While the overall model of the refinery is difficult to solve, the decomposition approach could obtain satisfactory and flexible scheduling results with much less computational efforts.