MILP-based Decomposition Method for theOptimal Scheduling of an Industrial Batch Plant

摘要

This paper considers a periodic scheduling problem from a fine chemicals plant thatsynthesizes active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). The objective is to select from theset of available equipment units those better suited for the production of a certainproduct. The trade-off involved is that, as the number of selected equipments increasesthe makespan decreases but so does the free capacity of the plant, making it harder toaccept new orders. The problem is tackled with a Resource-Task Network (RTN)discrete-time formulation, and a decomposition method is used to overcome apotentially large problem size resulting from the multiple possibilities of distributing theequipment units over the processing tasks. The results have shown that the method isvery efficient, since it can find good solutions in a few minutes of computational time.