Short-Term Scheduling of Crude-Oil Operations: Enhancement of Crude-Oil Operations Scheduling Using a Petri Net-Based Control-Theoretic Approach

To effectively operate a refinery and make it competitive, efficient short-term scheduling techniques that utilize commercial software tools for practical applications need to be developed. However, cumbersome details make it difficult to solve the short-term scheduling problem (STSP) of crude-oil operations, and mathematical programming models fail to meet the industrial needs. This article proposes an innovative control-theoretic and formal model-based method to tackle this long-standing issue. This method first models the STSP as a hybrid Petri net (PN) and then derives critically important schedulability conditions. The conditions are used to decompose a complex problem into several tractable subproblems. In each subproblem, there are either continuous variables or discrete variables. For subproblems with continuous variables, this work proposes a linear programming-based method to solve them; while, for subproblems with discrete variables, this work adopts efficient heuristics. Consequently, the STSP is efficiently resolved, and the application of the proposed method is well illustrated via industrial case studies.