Short-term scheduling of diesel blending and distribution

The present work is concerned with the development of alternative optimization models which address the scheduling problem of diesel blending and distribution in oil-refinery operations. The problem involves intermediate products stored in dedicated tanks that are blended to produce diesel with three different grades. The final products are then shipped to final destination through pipelines. Our study starts by revisiting a model originally proposed in the literature by Pinto et al. (2000). Next, improvements mainly concerning with the interface identification constraints are proposed and evaluated with the intention to extend the model applicability. Three different approaches were proposed. Results demonstrate that the introduction of penalties as to pumping interruptions produce good results enabling the formulations to be applied in cases where the time horizon is extended.