A CP Approach to the Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Multiproduct Continuous Facilities

ZEBALLOS, LUIS JAVIER; HENNING, GABRIELA

Village Rio das Pedras, Río de Janeiro, Brasil

Congreso; ENPROMER 2005 4th Mercosur Congress on Process Systems Engineering; 2005

UFRJ

This contribution presents a new Constraint Programming (CP) formulation to address the optimal operation of resource-based multiproduct continuous processes. In particular, facilities having continuous stages which manufacture intermediate or final products and a limited number of intermediate storage tanks, are tackled. The problem involves finding (i) the optimal sequence of production runs and (ii) the optimal agenda of usage of each storage tank. The proposed formulation is able to handle different features found in industrial environments such as dissimilar machines, sequence-dependent changeover times, production run-machine assignments and set-up times, production run length constraints, etc. Moreover, one of the main contributions of this paper is the handling of constrained resources of various types, such as intermediate storage tanks of limited capacity and qualified manpower required at some stages.