Integrated crude selection and refinery optimization under uncertainty

TitleIntegrated crude selection and refinery optimization under uncertainty
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsYang Y, Barton PI
JournalAIChE Journal
Volume62
Issue4
Pagination1038-1053
Abstract

Crude oil selection and procurement is the most important step in the refining process and impacts the profit margin of the refinery significantly. Due to uncertain quality of the crudes, conventional deterministic modeling and optimization methods are not suitable for refinery profitability enhancement. Therefore, a novel optimization scheme for crude oil procurement integrated with refinery operations in the face of uncertainties is presented. The decision process comprises two stages and is solved using a scenario-based stochastic programming formulation. In Stage I, the optimal crude selections and purchase amounts are determined by maximizing the expected profit across all scenarios. In Stage II, the uncertainties are realized and optimal operations for the refinery are determined according to this realization. The resulting large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation incorporates integer variables for crude selection and continuous variables for refinery operations, as well as bilinear terms for pooling processes. Non-convex generalized Benders decomposition (NGBD) is employed to solve this problem to obtain an ε-global optimum efficiently.

URLhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aic.15075/full
DOI10.1002/aic.15075