Browsing is a fundamental aspect of exploratory information-seeking. Associative browsing represents a common and intuitive set of exploratory strategies in which users step iteratively from familiar to novel bits of information. In this paper, we examine associative browsing as a strategy for bottom-up exploration of large, heterogeneous networks. We present Refinery, an interactive visualizat...

In model-based refinery scheduling, the varying composition of the crude being refined is a major challenge, especially for those reaction processes. In this paper, a classification based, multi-model approach is proposed to handle the frequently varying crude. The idea is to build a scheduling model for each type of feed crude, and the type can be determined by using an online classifier. The ...

The March 2005 British Petroleum (BP) Texas City Refinery disaster provided a stimulus to examine the state of process safety in the U.S. refining industry. Participatory action researchers conducted a nation-wide mail-back survey of United Steelworkers local unions and collected data from 51 unionized refineries. The study examined the prevalence of highly hazardous conditions key to the Texas...

Atmospheric pressure combined with a partial vacuum within chemical plant or refinery tanks can result in some ego-deflating moments. This article will review three catastrophic vessel failures in detail and touch on several other incidents. A 4000-gal acid tank was destroyed by a siphoning action; a well maintained tank truck was destroyed during a routine delivery; and a large, brand new refi...

Oil refineries provide the lifeblood for global economic health, and disruptions to their operations have major worldwide impact. We are developing a large-scale intelligent refinery control system to assist human operators in controlling refineries during abnormal situations. Based primarily on reactive and procedural approaches to intelligent behavior, the Abnormal Event Guidance and Informat...

Ion exclusion is a chromatographic process which separates components from an impure feedstock on the basis of molecular size and charge. A pilot plant ion exclusion separator was constructed to determine the technical and economic feasibility of recovering sugar from refinery jet 4 (the feedstock identified as most promising in terms of ease of treatment). Extensive tests on jet 4 from the Mal...

The refinery business involves tasks spanning across several departments and requiring close coordination and collaboration among them. Present-day business decision support systems are tuned to individual departments and their work processes and are incapable of exploiting the intricate interdependencies among them. There is a need for a decision support system that provides a structured way t...

−− This work presents a stochastic multiperiod model for representing a petroleum refinery. Uncertainty is taken into account in parameters such as demands, product sale prices and crude oil prices. In the present work, uncertainty is considered as a set of discrete scenarios, each representing a possible shifting of market expectations. Every environment is weighted through an expected probabi...

Supply chain management is one key area that has gathered much interest from both the academic and business communities. Today’s many uncertainties require that supply chains be nimble and resilient in reacting to disruptions for sustainable operations. We look at a refinery supply chain and present a strategy for recovering from disruptions by heuristic rescheduling. This is important as refin...

The biofuel mix in transport in the UK must be increased from currently exploited 3.33% to the EU target mix of 10% by 2020. Under the face of this huge challenge, the most viable way forward is to process infrastructure-compatible intermediate, such as bio-oil from fast pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass, into biofuels. New facilities may integrate multiple distributed pyrolysis units produc...