Real-time shared resource allocation by price coordination in an integrated petrochemical site

The efficient real-time plant-wide coordination of petrochemical production sites is a challenging and yet not fully resolved problem and its solution can substantially improve the productivity and the efficiency of such complex petrochemical plants. While a site-wide integrated optimization might be feasible in principle, the size of the problem, the unavailability of data and the management structures of the plants favour a distributed solution, where the global coordination has to be achieved by suitable mechanisms. In this paper we propose price based coordination in a moving horizon setting to achieve plant-wide real-time coordination of the utilization of shared resources without communication of detailed knowledge of the structure of the subsystems. The shared resources are considered as market commodities that are traded between the units and global coordination is achieved by real-time adjustment of their market prices. We provide results of different price coordination methods for a model of an integrated petrochemical site. The results clearly show that market mechanisms can be applied for the coordination of large sites in the petrochemical industry.