This study examined the impact of Human Resource (HR) practices (selection, training, compensation, and appraisal) and participation on the financial performance of U.S. petrochemical refineries. Survey results from HR and Operations respondents indicated that appraisal and training were significantly related to workforce skills and that training and compensation were marginally related to work...

We present a new Lagrangean approach for the pooling problem, a fundamental problem in the petro-chemical industry. The relaxation targets all nonlinear constraints, resulting in a Lagrangean subproblem with a nonlinear objective function, that is reformulated as a linear mixed integer program. Besides being used to generate lower bounds, the subproblem solutions are exploited within Lagrangean...

Magnetic Resonance finds countless applications, from spectroscopy to imaging, routinely in almost all research and medical institutions across the globe. It is also becoming more frequently used for specific applications in which the whole instrument and system is designed for a dedicated application. With beginnings in borehole logging for the petro-chemical industry Magnetic Resonance sensor...

Many processes operate only arounda limitednumber of operation points.In order to have adequatecontrol around each operation point, an adaptive controller couldbe used.Then,if the operationpoint changesoften, a largenumberof parameters wouldhavetobe adapted overand over again. This prohibits application of conventional adaptive control, whichis more suited for processes with slowly changing par...

Hui Bin Sun,1,2 Razi Nalim,3 and Hiroki Yokota1,2,3 1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 2Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 3Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, India...

In this paper we describe an optimisation package for finished product blending in oil refineries. It is used inside the FORWARD system, an advanced scheduling/simulation tool for the petro-chemical industry. The blend optimiser uses the rational constraint solver of CHIP, a constraint logic programming system. The optimiser handles different linear and non-linear blending laws, as well as diff...