Reduce the Gap Between Planning and Operation:More Reliable Planning by Predicting Downtime

摘要

Typical Planning Process:There is different level of planning:1.long term planning i.e.annual planning,5-year plan to identify suitable feedstock or optimum product basket to make long term contacts,annual budgeting planning to identify capital required for next financial year to buy crude,electricity,catalysts etc.2.Short-term planning i.e.operation planning which is done for next few month.i.e.4 month rolling plan,Weekly planning Operation planning is one of the key activities which planners do,it plays a crucial role in overall profitability as planner tried to make most profitable production plan considering various internal and external factors.External factors can be for feedstock availability and pricing,freight cost,product specs & demands whereas internal factors are unit's availability,operational conditions,blending etc.Therefore,before starting the planning process planner needs to take a lot of information from various sources or Department for upcoming planning period.for an example,they need to get the supply demand data from the market Department or from the trading Department.They also need to collect the pricing information which needs to be use as an input in the heavy based model.Apart from that planets needs to collect the operational data or information from the plant operation people or from the maintenance people this this data mainly include the availability of various units and the plant whether there is any plant shutdown or slow down for the next upcoming month.This Information Act as a base for the LP model setup and provide constraint for the LP optimization.Since all this data are assumption for the future,Accuracy of this data has a huge impact on overall optimization as all these constraints come up with a cost on overall profitability.If we put hard constraints,then overall plan will be suboptimal and will lead to suboptimal operation.This will cause huge margin leakage.On the other side,relaxed constraints can be unachievable when comes to operation and will create a GAP between what we planned vs what we can achieve.