This paper presents a mixed-integer
linear programming (MILP) model
with a continuous time representation to address the Tank Farm Operation
Problem (TFOP) of finished products in refineries. Real scenarios
are considered, which were obtained from the planning of refineries
and the external pipeline network scheduling, proposed by Ind. Eng. Chem. Res.2010495661.
The developed MILP model determines the scheduling of loading and
unloading operations in the tank farm of finished products at each
refinery, but is subjected to time-window constraints. A decomposition
approach has been applied, and multiproduct scenarios proposed by Ind. Eng. Chem. Res.2010495661 were
broken in single product scenarios. Each one of these scenarios is
related with the tank farm in a specific refinery. Therefore, they
are presenting volumes and values of stored inventories, maximum capacity
tanks, and start and end times to product movements at the refinery
interfaces (production, demand, and pipelines). The proposed MILP
model searches a scheduling that minimizes the movements within the
refinery tank farm in order to respect the imposed operational and
structural constraints. Further, for making feasible the scheduling
in a smaller computational time, an iterative algorithm is developed
and a new model approach, named MILP-IA, is added within the solution
process. The results allow us to analyze the model computational time,
the temporal and structural violations, and the number of product
movements for each scenario. For the studied cases, we can also check
for attending to time and monthly volume constraints for each interface.
Finally, the results also indicate that the proposed MILP-IA approach
finds solutions in computational times on the order of minutes. The
obtained solutions contribute to improve the transfer and storage
activities (TS) on two main points: (i) they minimize
the number of movements, facilitating the plant operational tasks
(searching for routes); and (ii) they provide feedback
to the pipeline scheduling, creating a collaborative integration between
refinery subsystems, linking all information about internal and external
product movements at refineries.