Abstract: A shortterm scheduling problem for crude oil operations can be divided into two levels by hierarchical method. At the upper level, a realizable refining schedule is obtained to optimize concerned objectives. At the lower level a detailed schedule is gotten to realize it.A refining schedule is known in this paper, with the goal to find the detailed production scheduling to realize it. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model based on discrete time representation is developed. After analysing the characteristic of the problem, it is transformed and can be solved by the heuristic algorithm which is presented in this paper. The algorithm not only ensures to obtain the target refining schedule, and also optimizes the switchtimes of crude oil in oil transportation and the mixtimes of tank heels. Finally, an industrial case study is presented to show the feasibility and validity of the proposed heuristic algorithm.

Key words: oil refining, detailed production scheduling, heuristic, mixed integer linear programming(MILP), optimization