Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Multi-Commodity Network Flow Approach For Sequencing Refined Products In Pipeline Systems, Rolando José Acosta Amado

Doctoral Dissertations

In the oil industry, there is a special class of pipelines used for the transportation of refined products. The problem of sequencing the inputs to be pumped through this type of pipeline seeks to generate the optimal sequence of batches of products and their destination as well as the amount of product to be pumped such that the total operational cost of the system, or another operational objective, is optimized while satisfying the product demands according to the requirements set by the customers. This dissertation introduces a new modeling approach and proposes a solution methodology for this problem capable of …