A tighter continuous time formulation for the cyclic scheduling of a mixed plant
In this paper. based on the cyclic scheduling formulation of Schilling and pentelides [Schilling. G., & Pantelides, C. (1999). Optimal periodic scheduling of multipurpose plants. Computers& Chemical Engineering, 23. 635-655], we propose a Continuous time mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the cyclic scheduling of a mixed plant, i.e. a plant composed of batch and continuous tasks. The cycle duration is a variable of the model and the objective is to maximize productivity. By using, strengthening techniques and the analysis of small polytopes related to the problem formulation, we strengthen the initial formulation by tightening sonic initial constraints and by adding valid inequalities. We show that this strengthened formulation is able to solve moderate size problems quicker than the initial one. However. for real size cases, it remains difficult to obtain the optimal solution of the scheduling problem quickly. Therefore, we introduce MILP-based heuristic methods ill order to solve these larger instances, and show that they can provide good feasible solutions quickly. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
continuous time formulation cyclic scheduling strengthening mixed integer programming heuristics