Priority-Slot-Based Continuous-Time MINLP Formulation for Crude-Oil Scheduling Problem with Two-Pipeline Transportation

Some oil refineries arrange low-fusion-point crude oil storage tanks and ones containing high-fusionpoint crude oil at two diverse locations. Refinery needs different pipeline to transport different fusion point oil, so, to transport diverse fusion point oil it needs two pipelines. Because of the constraints resulted from transporting high-fusion-point oil, to schedule such a system is very hard. Based on single-operation sequencing (SOS), this paper proposes a new MINLP formulation with transporting high-fusion-point oil and two pipelines transportation. The formulation is different from previous ones as it takes transporting high-fusion-point oil and two-pipeline transportation into account. It aims at minimizing the sum of high-fusion-point oil transportation cost. A simple two-stage MILP-NLP procedure is applied to solve this model and get a satisfactory optimality gap. Finally, this paper gives an intricate industrial example to illustrate application of the formulation.