Dynamic Management Of The Petrochemical Refining Crude Oil Production Inventory

Nowadays, integrated automation is an important issue for competitiveness in process industry. Effective techniques for management at the high level of corporation have been developed and distributed control system for the low level has been implemented in most process plants. However, it lacks techniques for the middle level. Thus, it is very important to develop techniques for that level. Refining industry is a typical process industry and is characterized by hybrid properties with both discrete event process and continuous material flow. In order to support dynamic production mamagement for such a system, dynamic information of crude oil inventory is necessary and inventory status at any time point is required. This is a great challenge.In this paper, we address the dynamic management of crude oil inventory. We first review the research and development status in this field and analyze the problems to be solved. Then, the goal of this paper is presented and the work is done based on a case problem, a typical refinery.To make dynamic management of crude oil inventory possible, two questions must be answered: 1) what dada should be stored, and 2) how to recover the status at any time points. To answer the first question, a method is developed to store the inventory data at only some discrete time ponts. These time points are determined by time interval and events defined in this paper. For the second question, we use soft computing to recovery the state at any time point. The method proposed has been realized for the case problem, it works well.