Optimal Loading and Unloading Operations at an Oil Terminal.

At an oil terminal or port crude oil is loaded into storage tanks for transmission to refineries for processing. The method used for loading and unloading crude from the tanks is important since inefficient use of the tanks may mean that ships are delayed from unloading for lack of tank storage space, and penalty costs would then have to be paid. In the paper the authors consider the loading-only, unloading-only and combined loadingunloading problems with a variety of objective functions. Dynamic programming is adopted for the solution of these problems with strong dominance conditions - including the use of bounds - being applied to reduce the state dimensionality. With these reductions, practical size problems - such as the operation of the ENI storage tanks at the port of Genoa for whom this work was undertaken - can be solved with a reasonable amount of computational effort.