Optimal Scheduling of Biodiesel Plants through Property-based Integration with Oil Refineries

Abstract

This paper addresses the design and scheduling problem of biodiesel plants in conjunction with typical oil refineries via blending of biodiesel and petro-diesel. The feedstocks are often seasonal and their availability and cost usually vary with time. A multi-period scheduling framework is formulated as an optimization problem to determine the optimal feedstock utilization and blending of biodiesel with petro-diesel using a property-integration framework. A case study is solved to illustrate the applicability of the devised approach. 2011 Elsevier B.V.