A Novel Network-based Continuous-Time Representation for Process Scheduling: Part II. General Framework

GIMÉNEZ, DIEGO MARCELO; HENNING, GABRIELA; MARAVELIAS, CHRISTOS

COMPUTERS AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Elsevier Science Ltd.

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2009 vol. 33 p. 1644 - 1660

0098-1354

In the first part of this series of papers we presented a new network-based continuous-time representation for the short-term scheduling of batch processes, which overcomes numerous shortcomings of existing approaches. In this second part, we discuss how this representation can be extended to address aspects such as: (i) preventive maintenance activities on unary resources (e.g. processing and storage units) that were planned ahead of time; (ii) resource-constrained changeover activities on processing and shared storage units; (iii) non-instantaneous resource-constrained material transfer activities; (iv) intermediate deliveries of raw materials and shipments of finished products at predefined times; and (v) scenarios where part of the schedule is fixed because it has been programmed in the previous scheduling horizon. The proposed integrated framework can be used to address a wide variety of process scheduling problems, many of which are intractable with existing tools.