A cost‐effective model for the gasoline blend optimization problem

Gasoline blending is a critical process with a significant impact on the total revenues of oil refineries. It consists of mixing several feedstocks coming from various upstream processes and small amounts of additives to make different blends with some specified quality properties. The major goal is to minimize operating costs by optimizing blend recipes, while meeting product demands on time and quality specifications. This work introduces a novel continuous‐time mixed‐integer linear programming (MILP) formulation based on floating time slots to simultaneously optimize blend recipes and the scheduling of blending and distribution operations. The model can handle non‐identical blenders, multipurpose product tanks, sequence‐dependent changeover costs, limited amounts of gasoline components, and multi‐period scenarios. Because it features an integrality gap close to zero, the proposed MILP approach is able to find optimal solutions at much lower computational cost than previous contributions when applied to large gasoline blend problems. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J , 62: 3002–3019, 2016