Integrated scheduling and inventory management of an oil products distribution system

The oil supply chain is facing new challenges due to emerging issues such as new alternative energy sources, oil sources scarcity, and price variability with high impact on demand and production and profit margins reduction. Additionally, the existence of large, complex and world wide spread businesses implies a complex system to be managed where distribution can be seen as one of the key areas that needs to be efficiently and effectively managed. Different types of distribution modes characterize the oil supply chain where the pipeline mode is one of the most complex to operate when having multiproduct characteristics. This paper addresses the planning of a generic oil derivatives transportation system characterized by a multiproduct pipeline that connects a single refinery to a storage tank farm. Two alternative mixed integer linear programming models (MILP) that aim to attain a set of planning objectives such as fulfilling costumers' demands (which is mandatory) while minimizing the medium flow rate are developed. Additionally, final inventory levels are avoided to be excessively low. A real world scenario of a Portuguese company is used to validate and compare the two alternative MILP models developed in this paper. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.