Scheduling of a Consumer Goods Production Plant with Intermediate Buffer by Decomposition and Mixed-integer Linear Programming

摘要

Varying demands and global competition pose significant challenges in the consumer goods industry. Exploiting market opportunities often leads to the need of an extension of the production capacities of manufacturing plants. This can be achieved by adding new plants or adding production units to existing plants which may require very significant investments. Another option is the reconfiguration of an existing plant layout to achieve higher throughputs at relatively low cost. A potential reconfiguration strategy is the decoupling of production stages by buffers which increases the flexibility and is efficient if the bottlenecks of the process vary over time. In this contribution the scheduling of an industrial consumer goods production plant with two production stages with a buffer in between the stages is discussed. This can be used to assess the benefits of the modified layout and for the later online scheduling of the plant with the buffer. The scheduling algorithm is based on decomposition and mathematical programming. The generated schedules are compared to schedules for the current layout.