Create a solution flexibility analytic

With the Solution Flexibility analytic, you can investigate the extent to which a certain variable may vary without your economic objective function (that is, the profit you make by running the refinery) decreasing more than a given margin. For example, you may want to know if you can buy less Agbami crude while letting your operating margin decrease by no more than 1%. In this case, the quantity of purchased Agbami would be your flexibility parameter.

These are three typical questions you can find an answer to with the help of the Solution Flexibility analytic:

• How robust is your plan to changes in economic and operational variables?

• What is the most/least of a given crude you can near optimally process? This will help decide what long-term contracts can be negotiated.

• What is the highest/lowest capacity you can near optimally run a given unit at? This will help decide how to best operate the refinery.

Flexibility parameters can be purchases or sales, and you can add them in the Flexibility Parameters page.

When you optimize the analytic, each flexibility parameter is treated separately and results in three cases:

• A case with the lowest amount of the parameter compatible with the objective function reduction.

• A case with the highest amount of the parameter compatible with the objective function reduction.

• A case with the optimal amount of the parameter within the objective function reduction.

Create a solution flexibility analytic

To create a Solution Flexibility analytic:

1. In the Model Explorer, select the case you wish to use as the basis for the analytic.

2. Do either of the following:

   • Click Add Analytic in the Cases group of the Home ribbon tab, and choose Solution Flexibility from the menu. The analytic case is created in the case tree and the analytic environment opens.

   • Right click on the basis case you have selected in the previous step and choose Analytics > Solution Flexibility from the context menu.

These are typical steps you would follow to configure a Solution Flexibility analytic case, optimize it and inspect the results:

3. Add one or more flexibility parameters to the Flexibility Parameters page.

4. If needed, add sensitivity items and define sensitivity scenarios in the Sensitivity page.

5. Optimize the cases in the analytic by clicking Optimize in the Optimization group of the Home ribbon tab.

6. Go to the Case Stack page and review the optimization status of all cases. Right click on any row and choose Create Cases from the context menu to create an instance of the corresponding case in the model case tree.

7. Go to any page in the Analysis section to review the results of the optimization via a number of tables and charts. In particular, the following pages are specific to the Solution Flexibility analytic:

   • Flexibility Parameters Summary: shows all the results from the analytic optimization in tabular form.

   • Flexibility Chart: shows the range of acceptable solution values for each flexibility parameter and each sensitivity scenario, if defined.

   • Flexibility Parameter Charts: shows separate charts for each flexibility parameter.