Abstract
Transportation of petroleum by a pipeline system is increasingly drawing attention because of its low expense, small volume, high safety, cheap labour etc. The purpose of this paper is to formulate optimal control and schedule for multi-terminal and multi-item fluid transportation systems in which several sources (supply) and sinks (demand) are interconnected by pipelines and various kinds of oils are transported packed in a pipeline sequentially. The problem is to determine the optimal supply schedule at each source and the transportation paths in such a way that the predicted demands of all items are satisfied and the cost function is minimized under several conditions. A feature of our analysis is that it is based on the thinking of chain flows (paths) and a state vector indicating which item is located at each section of the pipeline. (0-1) integer linear programming (an enumerative technique) can be applied to solve the formulated problem where the decision variables are the chain flows and the items sent out of the source.
