The scheduling of gasoline-blending operations is an important problem in the oil refining industry. Thisproblem not only exhibits the combinatorial nature that is intrinsic to scheduling problems, but alsonon-convex ...The scheduling of gasoline-blending operations is an important problem in the oil refining industry. Thisproblem not only exhibits the combinatorial nature that is intrinsic to scheduling problems, but alsonon-convex nonlinear behavior, due to the blending of various materials with different quality properties.In this work, a global optimization algorithm is proposed to solve a previously published continuous-timemixed-integer nonlinear scheduling model for gasoline blending. The model includes blend recipe optimi-zation, the distribution problem, and several important operational features and constraints. The algorithmemploys piecewise McCormick relaxation （PMCR） and normalized multiparametric disaggregation tech-nique （NMDT） to compute estimates of the global optimum. These techniques partition the domain of oneof the variables in a bilinear term and generate convex relaxations for each partition. By increasing the num-ber of partitions and reducing the domain of the variables, the algorithm is able to refine the estimates ofthe global solution. The algorithm is compared to two commercial global solvers and two heuristic methodsby solving four examples from the literature. Results show that the proposed global optimization algorithmperforms on par with commercial solvers but is not as fast as heuristic approaches.展开更多
基金Support by Ontario Research FoundationMc Master Advanced Control ConsortiumFundacao para a Ciência e Tecnologia(Investigador FCT 2013 program and project UID/MAT/04561/2013)
文摘The scheduling of gasoline-blending operations is an important problem in the oil refining industry. Thisproblem not only exhibits the combinatorial nature that is intrinsic to scheduling problems, but alsonon-convex nonlinear behavior, due to the blending of various materials with different quality properties.In this work, a global optimization algorithm is proposed to solve a previously published continuous-timemixed-integer nonlinear scheduling model for gasoline blending. The model includes blend recipe optimi-zation, the distribution problem, and several important operational features and constraints. The algorithmemploys piecewise McCormick relaxation （PMCR） and normalized multiparametric disaggregation tech-nique （NMDT） to compute estimates of the global optimum. These techniques partition the domain of oneof the variables in a bilinear term and generate convex relaxations for each partition. By increasing the num-ber of partitions and reducing the domain of the variables, the algorithm is able to refine the estimates ofthe global solution. The algorithm is compared to two commercial global solvers and two heuristic methodsby solving four examples from the literature. Results show that the proposed global optimization algorithmperforms on par with commercial solvers but is not as fast as heuristic approaches.
