Control-theoretic and model-based scheduling of crude oil transportation for refinery industry

Some refineries need to process both low and high fusion point crude oil. Often storage tanks are located at two geographically different sites, one for low fusion point crude oil and the other for high one. With two storage sites, two pipelines are needed to transport different types of crude oil. It is difficult to enforce the constraints resulting from high fusion point oil transportation. Reducing such transportation cost is among the most important goals sought by refinery industry. This work for the first time studies this scheduling problem from a control-theoretic viewpoint. Due to the hybrid property of the process, the system is modeled by a hybrid Petri net. With this model, an efficient method is presented to schedule the transportation of high fusion point crude oil.