Evaluating capacity and expansion opportunities at tank farm: A decision support system using discrete event simulation

This paper presents a discrete event simulation based Decision Support System to evaluate tank farm operations. The Decision Support System was developed in order to reduce capital expenditures and assist in decision making for assessing the impact of different improvement opportunities. The simulation based framework captures tank farm dynamics and can be easily scaled for additional products and different tank assignments/configurations. The model was successfully used to evaluate existing tank farm operations at a Freeport site of Dow Chemical company. In this paper, we discuss the general approach used for modeling tank farm operations and different output metrics generated by the Decision Support System.