A study on scheduling of naphtha transportation and storage systems for naphtha cracking center

The rapid increase of petroleum prices compelled to petro-chemical industries to figure out ways to remove any potential redundancies in and out of their network. The increasing attention on integrating activities that have been addressed separately is in line with this trend. Particularly this paper addresses a naphtha feeding problem for Naphtha Cracking Center (NCC). The naphtha feeding problem involves two key operations: delivering naphtha from refineries to NCC and blending naphtha in storage tanks before feeding it to NCC. While the first is concerned with selecting sources and scheduling the loading and unloading of naphtha, the latter involves the transfer of the naphtha from storage tanks to a charging tank. This paper considers both issues simultaneously by transforming them into a single mixed linear integer programming problem of minimizing the cost function of naphtha prices, shipping expenses, and unloading costs, etc. A numerical example of a real industrial case is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model.