Decomposition approaches for the design and scheduling of multiproduct multistage batch plants with parallel lines

摘要

Multiproduct chemical batch plants, often equipped with parallel production lines, are facilities where similar products are produced by sharing available equipment and time. Hence, when designing such plants, the operational use should be considered simultaneously. In this paper, the design and scheduling problem of a batch plant with parallel lines is addressed, using the Resource-Task Network formulation. The proposed mixed-integer linear programming model aims at minimising total costs through the optimisation of the number of lines to install, their design and the number, size and timings of the batches of every product on the installed lines. Besides an integral (exact) approach, we applied three decomposition approaches to tackle the computational complexity associated with this problem: line decomposition, bottleneck decomposition and a combination of both. Through several examples, it is shown that all three decomposition approaches reduce the computation times significantly compared to the integral approach, while obtaining (near) optimal solutions. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.