Scheduling of Crude Oil Operations in Refineries with Least Tank Requiremen

With the interaction of discrete-event and continuous processes, the short-term scheduling problem of crude oil operations is essentially combinatorial. As charging tanks are a type of critical resources, it is crucial to determine how many charging tanks are required to obtain a feasible schedule. Such a scheduling issue is studied in the viewpoint of control theory. By using a hybrid Petri net to describe the behavior of crude oil operations, we show that a feasible schedule can be found for a system with two distillers if there are two charging tanks for each distiller, which is the least number of charging tanks for finding a feasible solution. The scheduling method is simple and computationally efficient.