Short-term operational planning of refined products pipelines

Abstract

Pipelines are the safest and least expensive mode for transporting energy products over long distances. Refined products pipelines convey multiple oil derivatives from refineries to marketing terminals, usually through the same duct. Planning the injection, transportation and delivery of batches moving into pipelines is a very complex industrial problem with many operational constraints. This work synthesizes two innovative optimization tools for the short-term planning of oil product pipelines. The first one is a continuous-time mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the short-term planning of pipelines connecting a single source node to multiple terminals over a multiperiod horizon. In the second approach, the MILP formulation is extended to deal with the transportation planning of multi-source pipelines. Common-carrier pipelines often present input facilities at non-origin points, whose operation raises new difficulties. Solutions to real-world case studies illustrate the performance of the proposed optimization tools.