A New Event-Driven MILP Formulation for Short-Term Scheduling of Continuous Production Facilities

摘要

A new mathematical formulation for scheduling multi-purpose continuous processes is presented, based on an event-driven representation of time, and resulting into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model. The formulation is applicable to arbitrary process structures, variable unit processing rates, sequence-dependent changeovers, and flexible storage requirements. A medium-to-large scale manufacturing process is examined to illustrate the applicability and efficiency of the method. The formulation is shown to compare favorably with existing continuous-time models.