Development of an integrated decision-making method for an oil refinery restructuring in Brazil

This paper describes an integrated decision analysis method to support the managing board to define a restructuring plan for a small oil refinery in south Brazil. The refinery is facing an extreme crisis situation due to the obsolescence of its production plant. The decision approach proposed in this paper consists of four phases. Initially, potentially performing restructuring alternatives were identified, as well a set of criteria covering the dimensions of corporate sustainability. Based on the relative importance evaluation of each criteria given by a group of decision-makers, and on the performance of the alternatives in each of the criteria, a fuzzy decision-making method, called FETOPIS, was applied for ranking the alternatives. The information resulting from this analysis, along with economic data, was used in a portfolio optimization model to identify restructuring investment projects (RIPs), a combination of feasible restructuring alternatives. FETOPSIS was used again to generate overall performance scores of each RIP, aggregating the individual performances of the constituent alternatives. The application of the method in the refinery demonstrated the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed approach to facilitate the understanding and exploitation of the problem, considering simultaneously several distinct and conflicting dimensions.