Research on changing cycle scheduling for the spinpacks in polyester staple fiber plant

摘要

This paper addresses the changing cycle scheduling problem for the spinpacks in a typical polyester staple fiber plant. The problem is to determine when the spinpacks to be changed so as to minimize the total cost over a given planning horizon. The total cost consisting of the operating cost and the changeover cost for the spinpacks accounts for an important fraction in a polyester staple fiber production plant. In the paper, two mathematical methods based on optimization for changing cycle scheduling are proposed. The one is the economic order quantity (EOQ) method for long planning horizon. The other is a dynamic programming (DP) method for short planning horizon. The model and algorithm are tested by using the actual data set collected from a large-scale petrochemical plant; the computational results are compared to manual in the plant and verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed methods.