Simultaneous scheduling of front-end crude transfer and refinery processing

•Simultaneous scheduling of crude unloading, transferring, and processing (CUTP).•Developed a general refinery processing model.•Refinery processing status transition has been considered in CUTP scheduling model.

Scheduling of front-end crude-oil transfer and refinery processing are two critically important and challenging tasks to petroleum refineries. However, the simultaneous scheduling of front-end crude-oil transfer and refinery operations has never been considered in previous studies due to the large scale and complexity of the resultant optimization problem. In this paper, a systematic methodology for simultaneous scheduling of front-end crude transfer and refinery processing has been developed. It provides a large-scale continuous-time based scheduling model for crude unloading, transferring, and processing (CUTP) to simulate and optimize the front-end and refinery crude-oil operations simultaneously. The CUTP model consists of a newly developed refinery processing sub model, a crude processing status transition sub-model, and a borrowed front-end crude transferring sub model. The objective is to maximize the total operational profit while satisfying various constraints such as operation and production specifications, inventory limits, and production demands. The efficacy of the proposed scheduling model has been demonstrated by an industrial-scale case study.