Abstract
There are varieties of constraints for a short-term scheduling problem of crude oil operations in a refinery. These constraints are difficult to model and complicate the short-term scheduling problem. Among them, oil residency time and high fusion point crude oil transportation constraints are the challenging ones. With high setup cost for high fusion point oil transportation, it is desired that the volume of high fusion point oil can be transported as much as possible by a single setup. This may result in late transportation of other types of crude oil, leading to the violation of crude oil residency time constraint. These constraints are ignored by existing methods in the literature. To solve this problem, this paper studies the problem in a control theory perspective by viewing an operation decision in the schedule as a control. With this idea, the system is modeled by a hybrid Petri net. With this model and tank grouping strategy, schedulability analysis is carried out and schedulability conditions are presented with tank charging and discharging costs being taken into consideration. These conditions are necessary for determining a refining schedule and can be used to check whether a target-refining schedule is realizable or not. If so, a feasible detailed schedule for the refining schedule can be easily obtained by creating the operation decisions one by one.