Supply-based optimal scheduling of oil product pipelines

Oil product pipelines have features such as transporting multiple materials, ever-changing operating conditions, and synchronism between the oil input plan and the oil offloading plan. In this paper, an optimal model was established for a single-source multi-distribution oil product pipeline, and scheduling plans were made based on supply. In the model, time node constraints, oil offloading plan constraints, and migration of batch constraints were taken into consideration. The minimum deviation between the demanded oil volumes and the actual offloading volumes was chosen as the objective function, and a linear programming model was established on the basis of known time nodes’ sequence. The ant colony optimization algorithm and simplex method were used to solve the model. The model was applied to a real pipeline and it performed well.