One of the urgent and time-consuming problems in the area of oil and oil products transportation is the problem of oil cargo flows scheduling in trunk pipeline systems. The problem is complicated by the necessity to take into account both the characteristics of the oil pipelines themselves, the properties of oil and capacity of tank terminals.
The relevance of this topic is due to the deterioration in the composition and properties of incoming oil to the pipeline systems from suppliers, the increase in the share of high-sulfur oils and the need to supply low-sulfur oil to consumers.
The article considers a new approach to oil transportation scheduling in branched oil pipeline systems. A new approach based on mathematical model that solves the optimization transport problem. The transport problem is formalized as a system of objective function and constraints then this system is solved using linear and sequential quadratic programming methods. The system can be varied depending on the needs of a given pipeline system.
The approach allows to compute oil flow distribution during the certain time period (day, week, month, etc.) with given time sampling (hour, day, week, etc.) considering pipeline characteristics (flow capacity, technological regimes, etc.), oil properties (mass sulfur fraction, density, etc.) and capacity of tank terminals. Also, the approach allows to optimize oil transportation by energy consumption.
The possibilities of the proposed approach are shown using a system of 10 oil pipelines, 4 transitional tank terminals, 3 oil suppliers and 6 oil consumers. The result of flow distribution calculation in a branched system is the schedule of cargo flows for each pipeline in a whole pipeline system with all constraints satisfied and optimized objective function.
