Strategic Planning of Petroleum Supply Chains

The Petroleum Supply Chain (PSC) is a strategic sector of modern economy, known for its huge network of investments and complex infrastructures. As costs increase and margins flatten due to competition and environmental regulation, the PSC must cut costs to increase efficiency. This research focuses on the optimization at the PSC design level and presents a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that optimizes a PSC network of refineries, depots, and transport routes, considering supply and demand requirements as well as problem restrictions, such as available routes. Installations are opened and/or closed and capacities as well as transfer quantities are planned for the network infrastructures. The objective function improves company profits through a collaborative operation, by incorporating the revenues of participated installations. Model results are presented considering data in Portugal.