Distribution of oil products by pipeline networks

Everton Ranielly de Sousa Cavalcante, B.Sc. student in Computer Science
Thatiana Cunha Navarro Diniz, M.Sc. in Systems and Computing

Planning and scheduling of the operations in a pipeline network aim to use more eficiently the resources in order to get a greater improvement on its performance. A pipeline network designed to distribute oil products is composed of refineries (source nodes), storage parks (intermediate nodes) and terminals (demand nodes), interconnected by a set of polyducts, on which oil and derivatives can be transported between adjacent areas. Constraints related to storage limits, delivery time, sources availability, sending and receiving limits, among other, must be satisfied. In real-world scenarios, this problem is considered as a combinatorial problem with hard solution, so that it is necessary to use solution methodologies that have low computational time and, in order to have an approach that is more suitable to practice, the problem can be viewed as a biobjective problem that aims to minimize the needed time to transport the set of batches across the network and the successive transmission of different products in the same polyduct, called fragmentation, being considered losses originated by the formation of contamination interfaces due to the mixture of two products sent sequentially in a same polyduct.

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