Optimization of China’s strategic petroleum reserve policy: A Markovian decision approach

China is in the process of building Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as a utility for its oil supply security. In this paper we develop a stochastic dynamic programming model to optimize China’s stockpile policy with the objective of minimizing the discounted SPR policy costs over a finite time horizon. It is shown that a deterministic and Markovian policy is optimal to the model. A recursive procedure is designed to construct the value functions and derive the optimal stockpile acquisition and release rates over time. Post‐optimality analysis is performed to investigate sensitivities of the optimal policy to primary parameter assumptions.