Scheduling of batch processes: An industrial application in paint industry
In this work, the mathematical programming model for optimal scheduling of the operations of a batch processing chemical plant, capable to handle all possible deterministic and many stochastic variations in the set-up and operation times of the batch operations developed previously (Orcun et al., 1996, 1995, and 1994) is applied to operations in a plant of a leading Turkish paint manufacturer. The plant focused on in this work is a multi-product, batch processing plant having a wide variety of products, competing for various process equipment on a production site. The plant under consideration operates with respect to an ''order based'' production policy. Thus, this application can be classified as a short term scheduling of a real case multi-product batch processing plant. The MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) formulation generated as a result of the general modeling framework developed, is solved using the CPLEX 3.0 to obtain schedules maximizing the net operational plant profit under varying market conditions. Moreover, the analysis of the schedules obtained from the solution of the problems formulated yielded some information on the performance, utilization and organization of the production site.
batch operations short term scheduling integer programming production planning