Readability of target refining schedule for oil refinery

In discrete manufacturing, just in time schedule is pursued so as to better respond to the market. In the practice, it is also required to do so in oil refinery. However, the existing scheduling techniques for finding short-term scheduling in oil refinery are based on push production mode. This paper addresses the short-term scheduling for crude oil operations in a pull production way, or a target refining schedule derived from production planning is given as a constraint for schedule making. The system is modeled by Petri net, and based on the model an efficient heuristics is proposed to test the readability of the target refining schedule. If it is realizable, a feasible short-term schedule for crude oil operations that realize the target schedule is created. A case study is presented to show the application of the heuristics.