An MILP approach for detailed scheduling of multi-product pipeline in pressure control mode

Scheduling with hydraulic constraints is one of the crucial aspects to guarantee multi-product pipeline safety. This paper develops a discrete-time mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for a single-source multi-product pipeline in pressure control mode, minimizing the pump cost as well as the labor cost of pump stoppage/restart. Instead of limiting pressure through flowrate constraints, this paper adopts piecewise linear approximation to deal with pump characteristic curves and frictional loss associated to flowrate and establish corresponding pressure constraints. The pressure at all key points along the pipeline should be within the allowable range to ensure transport safety. In this way, the proposed model can attain the integrated optimization of the pipeline scheduling and pump scheduling, thereby avoiding the possible mismatch between pressure and flowrate obtained by two-step solving strategy. Finally, the proposed method is compared with another discrete-time MILP model (Chen et al., 2017) which sets the minimum pump rate variation as objective function for the operating economy. Two cases tested on a Chinese real-world pipeline are given to demonstrate that the optimal detailed schedules obtained by the proposed model perform better in both economy and the convenience of pump operations.