New continuous-time scheduling formulation for multilevel treelike pipeline systems

We propose a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for scheduling treelike systems with unidirectional flow. Refined products are converted to batches as they enter the pipeline so as to facilitate modeling the movement between pipeline segments. The novelty is the handling of multilevel branches, frequent in practice as illustrated with a real-life case study. Through the solution of three benchmark problems from the literature, we show that the new formulation is capable of finding better solutions in less time than a state-of-the-art product-centric formulation.