Refinery operations planning referes to as the problem of determining what type of crude (light, intermediate, heavy) to purchase and in what amounts so that the refinery can process it and satisfy the demand of several products (gasolines, jet fuel, diesel, fuel oils, lube oils, etc).
Our group became intersted in the Refinery operations planning problem as a way of testing our financial risk managemenmt methods. Thus, we developed methodologies to perform the decisions of what crude to purchase given uncertain demands mitigating risk. We then added the persepctive of products pricing, which in all current models is considered data: we made it a decision variable allowing its manipulation to make an effect on demand.
We have also worked on a model that integrated oil procuring and tankage as well as products distribution (storage and trucking included). We showed that integrated models can produce superior opertions planning.
Finally, we are working on making more detailed and nonlinear models, allowing the manipulation of processes variables (temperatures, pressures, space velocities in reactotrs, etc). We developed a special technique that can deal with all the computational burden very efficently.
Contact me for access to all published work