Abstract: The problem of suboptimal pipeline transfer rates in short-term crude oil scheduling is addressed 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, which considers five objectives: 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 improves single-objective optimization by 1.2% to 77.8% compared to existing methods.