Short-term Scheduling for Refinery Process: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Applications

It is a great challenge to find efficient tools for shortterm scheduling of oil refinery processes. Although some, theoretical advancement has been made in this field, a gap between theory and applications exists. In practice, the short-term scheduling job of oil refinery processes is still done manually by planners, because of the lack of such tools. This paper briefly introduces the production processes in a general oil refinery. Then, a short-term scheduling problem for such processes and requirements are presented. A brief review of the theoretic research advancement in this field is made. It shows that although progress in research in this field has been made, the techniques obtained are not applicable in the practice. Thus, the future research trends in this field should focus on methods that can bridges the gap between theory and applications. Based on the review, it is pointed out that it may be helpful if the problem is studied in a viewpoint of control theory and hence, solved by combining enumeration and heuristic instead of using mathematical programming formulations.