Engineering >> Industrial & Management Systems EngineeringOptimum Location of an Oil Storage Facility with Different Supply Ratesby Elizabeth Toth
Submitted : Spring 2014 In this problem three well are presented in a current location and one is trying to determine where to build an oil storage facility. When examining the engineering aspects of this task to increase profits from the oil obtained and reduce unnecessary expenses it is appropriate to find the optimal location (x,y) in which to construct the facility. This optimal location is where costs are minimized for total pipelines needed for the three wells. The locations for the wells are given in terms of miles: (x1, y1) = (-10,0), (x2, y2) = (12,-7), and (x3, y3) = (3, 7). How optimal location can be determine is through finding the distance of each point from the site where expenditures would be minimized (x,y). To do this one would have formulated three distances, and with these take the derivative in respect of both x and y. One would set all three of these functions added together equal to zero. Then substitutions can be made to make and rearrangements to find x, and y values. After the values for x and y are determined in computable terms the tools in Microsoft Excel can find the optimal location for the oil storage facility (x,y) through usage of successive substitution. It is seen from the resulting point that the optimal location would be centralized somewhere in the middle of the three well locations given. After this it is asked to obtain what would the cost per mile for the second well location need to be in order for the optimal location to be on top of the second well site. This value is determined through increasing the constraint of the cost for piping per mile until x and y converges to the values for well two. One will see when this is computed it won’t take the second well pipeline cost to increase too extensively to change the optimal location to on top of this well site. Related Links:
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