Neural networks for the optimization of crude oil blending

Crude oil blending is an important unit in petroleum refining industry. Many blend automation systems use real-time optimizer (RTO), which apply current process information to update the model and predict the optimal operating policy. The key unites of the conventional RTO are on-line analyzers. Sometimes oil fields cannot apply these analyzers. In this paper, we propose an off-line optimization technique to overcome the main drawback of RTO. We use the history data to approximate the output of the on-line analyzers, then the desired optimal inlet flow rates are calculated by the optimization technique. After this off-line optimization, the inlet flow rates are used for on-line control, for example PID control, which forces the flow rate to follow the desired inlet flow rates. Neural networks are applied to model the blending process from the history data. The new optimization is carried out via the neural model. The contributions of this paper are: (1) Stable learning for the discrete-time multilayer neural network is proposed. (2) Sensitivity analysis of the neural optimization is given. (3) Real data of a oil field is used to show effectiveness of the proposed method.