Planning, scheduling and control systems: why can they not work together
The decisions made by the planning, scheduling, and control functions have a large economic impact on process industry operations - estimated to be as high as $10 per ton of feed for many plants. The current process industry environment places even more of a premium on effective execution of these functions. In spite of the incentives, or maybe because of them, there exists significant disagreement about the proper organization and integration of these functions, indeed even which decisions are properly considered by the planning, scheduling or control business process. Advances in data capture and conditioning, sophisticated analytical techniques, and high performance computing environments provide improved support for all the three functions, High-speed communications can transfer information and data almost without limits. Yet, maintaining consistency among the decisions in most process companies continues to be difficult and the lack of consistency has real economic consequences. III this paper, we examine the following questions: what are the key issues, similarities, and differences for these functions in support of process industry decision-making? What are the roadblocks in achieving the integration that seems technically feasible? The answers have significant financial implications as well as implications with regard to technology selection, infrastructure design, and staffing requirements. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
production planning production scheduling on line optimization advanced control system integration change management