A Short Run Model of the World Petroleum Network Based on Decomposition

Abstract

Progress to date on a large model of the world petroleum network is outlined. This model is unusual among its peers in its assumption of completely blocked operation of each refinery. This allows each intermediate feedstock to retain its crude identity all the way to final blending and downstream process coefficients to be tailored to the properties of each crude. This added realism is bought at a high cost in model size. The resulting linear program contains some 20,000 rows and 65,000 columns. Fortunately, the assumption of blocked operation allows the model to be decomposed in an extremely natural manner. By taking advantage of this structure, computational costs per run have been achieved which are approximately equal to those obtained with considerably less descriptive models. Prospects for further improvements in computational efficiency are discussed.