Chapter 16: The Pooling Problem
Sreekanth Rajagopalan, Nikolaos V. Sahinidis · Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2017
16.1 ▪ Introduction The pooling problem has its roots in the refining industry, where the requirement for blending of raw materials (crudes) becomes an integral part of planning. Here, the raw materials of different grades often need to be stored in a limited number of storage tanks, blended to achieve a certain target quality specification, and dispatched to further downstream processes or customers. The pooling problem aims at identifying the right mixing proportions toward minimizing the overall cost of satisfying the demands. The multicommodity flow nature of the pooling problem results in a multiextremal nonlinear optimization (NLO) problem. Alfaki and Haugland [49] showed that the pooling problem is NP-hard, even when the number of pools is fixed.