Integrated Product Blending Optimization for Oil Refinery Operations

Refinery is a multiproduct manufacturing plant. Crude oil is processed to get intermediate products which are blended to meet quantity, quality and schedule specification of the final products. Refinery optimization is a complex problem therefore it is broken down into sub-problems which are solved independently. The solution obtained using this approach can be improved by integrating different sub-problems for real-time optimization. Refinery works on very small Gross Refinery Margin (GRM); off specification product blends results in considerable cost overhead because product blending is the last operation in the refinery process. Therefore we propose a method for real time integration of product blending with secondary process units to significantly improve the GRM. This method is designed and implemented in the present work. A case study is included to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method.