Short-Term Scheduling of a Polymer Compounding Plant

摘要

This paper addresses the optimal short-term scheduling of a three parallel production line polymer compounding plant, whose equipments require cleaning between product changeovers. A very effective user-friendly software tool was developed, which consists of a general scheduling model coupled with the capabilities of Microsoft Excel for data handling and analysis. The scheduling model is based on a Resource Task Network discrete time formulation and leads to Mixed Integer Linear Programming problems. As outputs the user can access the optimal schedules for a number of different objectives.