With rising global demand and highly volatile prices, the oil industry faces two major challenges: the reduction of costs and the optimization of its industrial assets.
An important process in this industry is the crude oil blending in crude distillers. Crude oil blending is often undertaken to increase the sale price or process-ability of a lower grade crude oil by blending it with a higher graded and priced crude. The main purpose of this process is to produce blended crude oil to a target specification at the lowest costs.
The quality of the blending process is affected by multiple decisions, such as the ship scheduling, the inventory management in tanks, the pipeline routing and the feeding process of the crude distillers. Ships are the mean mode of transport for crude oils and their timing and load affect the tank inventory management. Furthermore, the crude oils are transported to the crude distillers via the hardware configuration and the inventory management in the tanks has influence on this pipeline routing and feeding process. All these decisions have to be coherent in order to reduce costs. Quo Mare uses optimization to increase efficiency in the crude oil blending process of refineries. Our model takes into account the ship scheduling, inventory management, pipeline routing and feeding process of the crude distiller, which results in better solutions than standard optimization software.