Optimization of gasoline blending and scheduling in refinery complexes
Gasoline blending and scheduling is the last and important operation in a refinery.It is also the last chance to improve the quality of products and to reduce the production costs.Firstly,a novel mixed integer nonlinear programming(MINLP) formulation based on continuous time representation,is presented in this paper.Gasoline blending and short-term scheduling are integrated in the proposed model to optimize blending and scheduling simultaneously,and a nonlinear blending model is employed to reduce the quality excess of gasoline products.Empirical knowledge and some effective sets are added to the model to reduce the model scale and to improve the solve performance.A novel algorithm for the presented model is proposed.A series of mixed integer linear programming(MILP) model is solved instead of solving the original MINLP problem directly.Finally,a real industrial example,provided by a refinery complex,is used to demonstrate the performance of the presented model and algorithm.The model can get the optimal results in a reasonable time,which is more profitable than the conventional or other methods.