| Summary: | The world is focused on advancing a lower carbon future. Despite this focus, global energy requirements continue to grow at a rapid pace. The transition to cleaner, renewable energy sources cannot happen overnight, and many aspects of daily life involve products derived from petroleum. The organizations producing petroleum and petroleum products must focus on minimizing the impacts of supplying these products and controlling the environmental impacts of their production.
In this thesis, Operations Research and Systems Thinking are coupled to suggest practical optimization techniques for which upstream petroleum producers may gain additional revenue streams to fund a lower carbon future. Current challenges for these firms include global competition to supply petroleum energy and increased difficulty obtaining institutional investors. While many optimization efforts in the industry have focused on reservoir management, strategic asset planning, and production flows, this thesis aims to provide additional value by demonstrating coupled approaches of Operations Research and Systems Thinking toward resource routing and surface resource planning.
Three classic optimization problems are applied to an upstream petroleum producer to demonstrate the use of optimization and potential applications to address resource constraints and the sociotechnical system using Operations Research and Systems Thinking – the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), and the Facility Location Problem (FLP). Architectural decisions in the system are varied and represented as constraints to numerous optimization scenarios to produce value-robust designs. Further design analysis entails multi-attribute tradespace exploration to help decision-makers determine the perceived value of the tradeoffs between needs and constraints.
|
|---|