Product cycling with uncertain yields: Analysis and application to the process industry

摘要

We formulate the dynamic product-cycling problem with yield uncertainty and buffer limits to determine how much product to produce at what time to minimize total expected switching, production, inventory storage. and backorder costs, A "restricted" Lagrangian technique is used to develop a lower bound and a model-based Lagrangian heuristic. We also develop an operational heuristic and a greedy heuristic. The operational heuristic has been implemented at seven refineries at Cerestar, Europe's leading manufacturer of wheat-and corn-based starch products in the food-processing industry. This has already reduced total costs by around 5 percent or