Abstract: This paper aims to address the problem of suboptimal pipeline transfer rates in short-term crude oil scheduling using a decomposition approach that converts discrete pipeline transfer rates into a continuous range. A novel decision generation method is introduced to avoid direct search in the continuous transfer rate domain, thereby maintaining algorithm performance. A crude oil scheduling method based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm is proposed, by reasonably designing state features, action space, and reward function. Five objectives are considered including pipeline mixing costs, tank bottom mixing costs, distiller switching tank costs, charging tank usage costs, and energy consumption costs. Case analysis shows that the SAC-based scheduling method improves single-objective optimization by 1.2% to 77.8% compared to existing methods.