Multimodal Transportation Optimization of Refined Oil Logistics Considering Daily Scheduling: Case from China

Abstract

With the rapid development of global industrialization, the consumption of refined oil is at a high level. The scale of refined oil transportation is huge. For refined oil sales enterprises, determining a method for making reasonable transportation plans and reducing transportation cost has become an important means to improve competitiveness. The current method of developing a primary logistics plan does not consider the characteristics of various transportation modes, which can lead to an increase in overall costs. The logistics system in this case has multiple transportation modes, including road, rail, and pipeline. In addition, a multiproduct pipeline has multiple injection points. For such a complex system, this work unifies the time dimension of continuous transportation by pipeline and discrete transportation by rail and road based on the idea of multimodal transportation. This paper couples a pipeline scheduling submodel and a logistics optimization submodel to construct a daily scheduling model for refined oil which is close to the actual operation in the field. This model was validated using a refined oil logistics system in China, and the results show that the optimized logistics solution decreased total transportation costs by 14.5% compared with the actual cost. This model can serve as a guide for actual operations.