Refinery Planning and Scheduling: An Overview

Abstract

In this chapter, we give an overview of recent literature on the planning and scheduling of refinery activities. Planning of refinery activities ranges from determining which crude oil types to acquire to which products that should be produced and sold in the market. The scheduling ranges from scheduling of crude oil unloading and blending to blending of components to finished products. This overview treats three different categories of activities: planning and scheduling of crude oil unloading and blending, production planning and process scheduling, and product blending and recipe optimization. The focus will be on identifications of problems, the models outlined for the specified problems, and the computational difficulties introduced by the models. A final section discusses an agenda for future research.