Design and planning petroleum supply chain

In recent years, the petroleum industry has grown increasingly complex as a result of tighter competition, stricter environmental regulations and lower profit margins. These factors and others forced petroleum companies for a greater need in strategic planning and optimisation in order to make decisions that satisfy conflicting multi-objective situation, goals of maximising expected profit while simultaneously minimising risk. The main purpose of this paper is the design and development of a simulation model for a petroleum supply chain to be used as a planning and decision making tool while considering factors such as oil flow rate, quality of crude oil, distillation time and separators failure rate. The simulation model is then designed and implemented to measure the performance of the petroleum supply chain proposed. ARENA software is used to build the proposed models and the results of experiments are analysed using SPSS software.