A comparative study of continuous-time models for scheduling of crude oil operations in inland refineries

This work presents a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art multiple time-grid representations and formulations for the crude oil scheduling problem in inland refineries. We compare the event-based model, the unit slot model and the multi-operations sequence (MOS) model. Pros and cons of different models are highlighted based on modeling and computational experiments. We also propose several extensions of the previous models. The MOS model solved the problem much faster comparing to the other two models, but failed to find the best solution of some problems.

► A comparative analysis of multiple time-grid representations and formulations for the crude oil scheduling problem is presented. ► We compare the event-based model, the unit slot model and the multi-operations sequence (MOS) model. ► Several extensions of the previous models are presented. ► The MOS model exhibits promising computational performance compared with the other two models.