A Mathematical Programming Approach to Optimize the Scheduling of Tanks in Oil Refineries

This paper presents a Mathematical Programming approach to optimize the scheduling of tanks in oil refineries. The considered problem is part of oil industry supply chain, where decisions are taken in strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The scheduling of tanks is part of the operational level and plays a fundamental role in integrating refinery production and transport operations. In particular, within the real-world studied scenario, a pipeline network is used to transport the derivatives, and the previously determined scheduling of pipelines is used as an input for the proposed model. Thus, the operational constraints and temporal issues from pipelines, which influence the transfer and storage refinery operations, are taken as assumptions within the proposed scheduling model for tanks. The proposed model is structured by a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation with a continuous time representation. The obtained results are evaluated by three main aspects: the respect of time-windows imposed by pipeline operations; by the storage profiles in tanks; and, by computational tests. The obtained results indicate the model's ability to propose a scheduling for refinery tanks that integrates the inherited scheduling of pipelines.