Detailed Design of Multiproduct Batch Plants Considering Production Scheduling

FUMERO, YANINA; CORSANO, GABRIELA; MONTAGNA, JORGE MARCELO

INDUSTRIAL & ENGINEERING CHEMICAL RESEARCH

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

Lugar: Washington; Año: 2011 vol. 50 p. 6146 - 6160

0888-5885

Most previous approaches for the design of multiproduct batch plants have assumed the simplest scheduling policy. In order to simplify the formulation and take into account that many times demands are uncertain, they have used single product campaigns to determine the plant configuration and select the unit sizes. From the commercial point of view, this production mode is not realistic: for example, huge inventories should be kept to support this approach. However, when a stable context can be assured, the simultaneous resolution of design and a more detailed scheduling allows assessing different trade-offs. This article presents a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation assuming mixed product campaigns. Now, the composition and the sequence of the batches in the campaign must be determined as well as the assignment of batches to units when parallel units are used. Taking into account that the plant configuration is simultaneously obtained, the scheduling problem must be solved without knowing the number of available units and their sizes. Several examples are presented in order to show the performance of the proposed approach.