This paper addresses the scheduling and inventory management of a straight pipeline system connecting a single refinery to multiple distribution centers.By increasing the number of batches and time periods,maintaining...This paper addresses the scheduling and inventory management of a straight pipeline system connecting a single refinery to multiple distribution centers.By increasing the number of batches and time periods,maintaining the model resolution by using linear programming-based methods and commercial solvers would be very time-consuming.In this paper,we make an attempt to utilize the problem structure and develop a decomposition-based algorithm capable of finding near-optimal solutions for large instances in a reasonable time.The algorithm starts with a relaxed version of the model and adds a family of cuts on the fly,so that a near-optimal solution is obtained within a few iterations.The idea behind the cut generation is based on the knowledge of the underlying problem structure.Computational experiments on a real-world data case and some randomly generated instances confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of the solution quality and time.展开更多
文摘This paper addresses the scheduling and inventory management of a straight pipeline system connecting a single refinery to multiple distribution centers.By increasing the number of batches and time periods,maintaining the model resolution by using linear programming-based methods and commercial solvers would be very time-consuming.In this paper,we make an attempt to utilize the problem structure and develop a decomposition-based algorithm capable of finding near-optimal solutions for large instances in a reasonable time.The algorithm starts with a relaxed version of the model and adds a family of cuts on the fly,so that a near-optimal solution is obtained within a few iterations.The idea behind the cut generation is based on the knowledge of the underlying problem structure.Computational experiments on a real-world data case and some randomly generated instances confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of the solution quality and time.