Improving the Mathematical Formulation for the Detailed Scheduling of Refined Products Pipelines by Accounting for Flow Rate Dependent Pumping Costs

This work presents a continuous-time mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to find the best detailed schedule for single-source multi-product pipelines, minimizing the total operating costs. By knowing the aggregate plan including pumping and delivery tasks, the best detailed solution tends to minimize pump stoppage/restart costs as well as pumping energy charges associated to the head loss inside the pipeline, which are strongly dependent on the flow rate at every pipeline segment.