ABSTRACT In order to reflect the actual production situation more comprehensively and optimize the production cost, this paper solves the short‐term scheduling optimization problem for a single pipeline containing high melting point crude oil. Based on the refining plan given by the upper layer, a multi‐objective optimization model with high melting point crude oil constraints is established to optimize five common cost objectives in the scheduling process. For the model characteristics, the NSGA‐III algorithm is used to solve the problem. The reference points of the algorithm can be flexibly set according to the number of objectives, which allows for more efficient coverage of the high‐dimensional objective space. The results show that the NSGA‐III algorithm performs better in the solution performance, and the hypervolume (HV) indicator is improved by more than 10% compared with other algorithms. Comparison of the solution sets obtained using the NSGA‐III algorithm with the existing literature shows that the optimization results on different objectives are improved by 4.6%–13.3%, and the comprehensive cost index is significantly reduced, which proves the effectiveness of the method. This study provides a more cost‐effective solution to the practical scheduling problem in refineries by incorporating high melting point crude oil constraints and improving the efficiency of the algorithm.