Research Projects

This proposal is aspired to develop a continuous time formulation for a crude oil scheduling that maximizes the profit. The formulation will be based on an evolutionary algorithm to have robustness and computational efficiency. Further, the model will be extended to multiple objectives to handle crude oil distillation unit (CDUs) feed fluctuation and also dynamic conditions. The formulation will have preventive scheduling to immune the future uncertainties and also reactive scheduling to deal with online uncertainties like demand fluctuation and VLCC delay. Lastly, planning and refinery products blending and distribution will be integrated to optimize the operation. Further, a generic framework will be developed which can incorporate not only the different sizes of crude oil scheduling problems but also can be extended to other problems involving network structures such as heat exchanger network, batch plant scheduling, etc.