Refinery production planning – model and solution method

In this paper we present a general model and solution approach for refinery process planning. The model is nonlinear and has a flexible description to account for different configurations at a refinery.
The solution approach is based on solving the nonlinear model directly with a commercial solver. Since the model is highly nonlinear we apply a special procedure to find a good starting solution. We test standard commercial nonlinear solvers on a set of standard test examples.