  The majority of overland transport needs for crude petroleum and refined
petroleum products are met using pipelines. Numerous studies have developed
optimization methods for design of these systems in order to minimize
construction costs while meeting capacity requirements. Here, we formulate
problems to optimize the operations of existing single liquid commodity
pipeline systems subject to physical flow and pump engineering constraints. The
objectives are to maximize the economic value created for users of the system
and to minimize operating costs. We present a general computational method for
this class of continuous, non-convex nonlinear programs, and examine the use of
pump operating settings and flow allocations as decision variables. The
approach is applied to compute optimal operating regimes and perform
engineering economic sensitivity analyses for a case study of a crude oil
pipeline developed using publicly available data.
