Simulation of production and sales planning in refinery operations

In this paper we discuss some computational experiments on simulating refinery operations. We compare an integrated approach with recursively solving a production planning and sales planning problem. We test two different descriptions of the demand behaviour. The first is based on a fixed lower and upper limit and the second on a demand that varies with the product price. We also test the impact of different number of time periods in the planning horizon. We simulate the behaviour when detailed information of the demand is available.