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Advancements in Planning and Scheduling Business Process Integration
2011 NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum
Authors: Steven Boyd, Chevron; Lei Wu & Jaret Radford, M3
Migrating from complex spreadsheets to robust scheduling software that is fully integrated into the enterprise business processes to produce the operating guidelines provides a unified business perspective for efficient collaboration. The Challenge: How to use these advanced decision support tools to maximize the value of collective business intelligence to capture tangible and intangible enterprise value. This paper presents Chevron’s experience in delivering on that value. Tangible value includes better prediction of crude mixes, yields and increased visibility into refinery constraints.
Chevron business process integration paper
Planning and Scheduling in Refinery Optimization
2011 NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum
Authors: Mark Swensen, Valero; Dr. Dong, M3
Optimizing a refinery starts with the planning and scheduling activities. Planning estimates the optimum average crude slates, feedstock mixes, and production. Scheduling determines the feasible sequencing of controllable activities (events) to optimize the refinery. Scheduling is the hub that coordinates the contributions of many to optimize the refinery. Valero shares their experience that includes their planning-scheduling-blending initiative, integration with on-line control processes, blend optimization for crude and products, pipeline/supply chain simulation, the technologies used, rollout experiences, and benefits.
Valero refinery optimization paper
A Fully Integrated Refinery Scheduling Application in a Grassroots Refinery
Downstream Asia 2011 Singapore Conference
Authors: Simon Rogers, M3; Pankaj Zawar, Opteamates
An advanced scheduling system, including the coastal crude terminal, the 1500 km crude pipeline and the refinery, was implemented by a combined team from Client, IBM, Opteamates, and M3 in five months. The solution includes scheduling the receipts of crude at the SPM, multi-blend optimisation of the crude oil and scheduling the transfer of crude from the coastal terminal to the refinery including tracking the line fill. Diesel and gasoline are produced using run-down blending. Euro III and IV products can be made simultaneously and their recipes are optimised over the scheduling horizon using M3's multi-blend technology. The solution is integrated with enterprise systems using Web Services.
Integrated refinery scheduling paper
PETRONAS Gas Production Planning and Visualization
September 2011, Yokogawa MES Center in Singapore published a white paper about how PETRONAS Gas Bhd improves production planning and visualization at the Gas Processing Plants in Kertih using Yokogawa's Workflow Composer VP and M3's SIMTO Scheduling system.
PETRONAS Gas white paper
Saudi Aramco Scheduling and Blend Optimization Project Kicked Off
October 2010 - Saudi Aramco, Ras Tanura Refinery licensed SIMTO Refinery Scheduling and M-Blend for product optimization. The refinery has crude oil capacity of 325,000 barrels a day. This important project was awarded to M3 in collaboration with our Middle East partner Hyperion Systems Engineering.
CITGO Petroleum Scheduling System Upgrade
September 2010 - CITGO, Corpus Christi, Texas Refinery upgraded from a legacy system to SIMTO Scheduling. CITGO was able to implement the solution themselves after receiving SIMTO training. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, Houston, TX, is wholly-owned by PDV America an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela S.A (PDVSA) the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
HMEL Scheduling and Blend Optimization Project Kicked Off
September 2010 - HMEL, Guru Gobind Singh Refinery in Bhatinda, India (a greenfield refinery with crude capacity of 9 MMTPA) is a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum and Mittal Energy and licensed SIMTO Refinery Scheduling, M-Blend optimization and Dock Manager. This important project was awarded to M3 in collaboration with our India partner Opteamates.
GS Caltex Scheduling and Blend Optimization Project Kicked Off
May 2010 - GS Caltex, Yeosu, Korea, awarded their Refinery Scheduling and Blend Optimization Project to M3. Dr. Dong said "We are honored to be selected by one of the largest oil refining complexes in the world. GS Caltex has a strong reputation in the industry for its technological and operational excellence."
GS Caltex has crude oil refining facilities in Yeosu, Korea with a capacity of 750,000 barrels a day, and provides a stable supply of oil products to the national and the worldwide markets. The refinery production scheduling & blending optimization project includes operational activities such as crude oil scheduling, plant and process unit scheduling, multi-period blend optimization of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and other fuels and integration with various plant and enterprise information systems.
GS-Caltex aims to be Korea's total energy service leader, performing, not only in the petroleum and petrochemical businesses, but also diversifying its energy business to cover all energy fields including: City gas, LNG, Electric power, Exploration & production, New and Renewable Energy.
A Supermajor Oil Company Purchased an Enterprise License for
M3's Trading Solution
The company procured an enterprise license for M3's SIMTO M-Blend (multi-blend optimization) and SIMTO Integration Depot software for its worldwide trading business. The solution includes blend optimization, inventory management and scheduling management.
M3's multi-period blending software will provide a rapid analysis tool for optimizing blends, managing inventories and sharing common work practices across multiple locations. M-Blend will be used as the standard blend optimization tool for distillate, fuel oil, VGO, crude and gasoline.
Collaboration between traders and terminal blenders, using the multi-user / multi-model system, will significantly reduce the time to value a trade and make better informed trading decisions.
Agile Supply Chain Planning
Hydrocarbon Processing Magazine, October 2009
Authors: Chad Thomas & David Tong, Chevron; David Jasper & Craig Acuff, M3
View pdf: Chevron Planning Article
Historically refinery planning begins with setting constraints and targets, and optimizing an objective function in a LP model. As we look beyond the refinery and include more of the Supply Chain, additional information is needed for building a better optimized plan. Agile Supply Chain Planning requires a timely assembly of enterprise and refinery data, more user functional perspectives, rapid turn-around of plan improvements, user friendly visual tools, and synthesis of new/improved LP cases.
The supply chain planning workspace can help businesses plan better, to perform better, across the wide spectrum of procurement, manufacturing, and distribution activities.
Manufacturing costs are reduced by aligning the refinery production forecast with demand and trading opportunities and reducing overall feedstock costs. A planning workspace can integrate with the refinery scheduling systems so that the production forecast as well as constraints, inventory, operating parameters (i.e. process unit run rates) can be easily shared. This helps refinery management sync up with procurement and distribution planning objectives.
NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum
Oct 12th - 14th, 2009 Fort Worth, Texas
Agile Supply Chain Planning
Authors: Chad Thomas & David Tong, Chevron; David Jasper & Craig Acuff, M3
Historically refinery planning begins with setting constraints and targets, and optimizing an objective function in a LP model. As we look beyond the refinery and include more of the Supply Chain, additional information is needed for building a better optimized plan. Agile Supply Chain Planning requires a timely assembly of enterprise and refinery data, more user functional perspectives, rapid turn-around of plan improvements, user friendly visual tools, and synthesis of new/improved LP cases.
Scheduling for Performance: from Managing Inventory to Managing Quality
Authors: Carlos DeAlmeida, Mark Georgen, Scott Godfrey, David Hollingsworth & Joe Van Gogh, Tesoro Corp.; Dong Dong & Nam Nguyen, M3
Read interview with Mark at 2009 NPRA Q&A about Tesoro Refinery Scheduling
Refineries seek to improve profits under the pressures of business climate, regulatory compliance, and customers' demands. One way is to improve the use of current assets through scheduling for performance. Scheduling refining processes is thus reaching beyond inventory management to quality management to cope with feedstock variations, process unit limitations, and product requirements. With the forecasting power of scheduling tools, refineries are tracking the quality of crude oil charges to ensure that the crude units are operating in the right mode. We are monitoring the intermediate streams not only to maximize production but also to fill process units and comply with environmental regulations. We are optimizing product blending in both long-term and short-term schedules to meet demands and product specifications while best utilizing current inventories. Managing the quality of process streams has helped respond quickly with changes in crude oil supply and market conditions.
Tesoro Corp. Standardizes on M3 Technology for Oil Refinery Scheduling and Blend Optimization
Tesoro has licensed M3 Technology enterprise, refinery scheduling software including SIMTO Scheduling (scheduling all tank transfers, crude oil scheduling, process unit scheduling and product run downs), SIMTO M-Blend (multi-period blend optimization for crude and fuels blending) and SIMTO Global (provides for managing global refining assets and inventories) as well as Integration Depot for all of Tesoro's refineries.
Learn more >
Singapore Refining Co. Scheduling Project Kicked Off in January 2009
M3 kicked off our first project in Asia at Singapore Refining Company. SRC processes about 285,000 b/d of crude oil and is a major producer of refined products to the region. The project includes our complete suite of scheduling applications. We are proud to be selected for this important project. SRC will be our showcase site in Asia.
End-to-End Refinery Scheduling
Drilling & Exploration World Journal, October 2008
Authors: Robert Hutchings, Dr. Dong Dong & Nam Nguyen, M3
View pdf: End-to-End Refinery Scheduling Article
End-to-End Refinery Scheduling describes how refinery scheduling including crude blending, jetty management, process unit scheduling, gasoline and fuels blening is simplified with interactive process flowsheet models, Gantt charts to optimize plant events and case comparisons to evaluate operating scenarios. This helps make difficult and time-constrained decisions. SIMTO simulates the impact of crude quality changes on product yields. M-Blend optimizes multi-blends over multi-periods to minimize costs and quality giveaway. Dock Manager automatically schedules cargo receipts and shipments within constraints from weather to terminal inventory. These applications work together seamlessly and communicate with other systems through SIMTO Integration Depot and Web Services.
2008 NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum
M3 Technology was honored to make two presentations at the 2008 NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum:
- A Network and Linear Programming (LP) based Approach for Analyzing the Refinery Tank Adequacy System by Sumeet Desai and Dr. Dong
- Dealing with Crude Supply Problems Requires Quick, Accurate, Scheduling Decisions by Robert Hutchings and Dr. Dong
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