A comprehensive CP approach for the scheduling of resource-constrained multiproduct multistage batch plants

NOVARA, FRANCO MATÍAS; NOVAS, JUAN MATÍAS; HENNING, GABRIELA

Lappeenranta

Congreso; ESCAPE 23 - 23rd European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering; 2013

European Federation of Chemical Enginnering

Multiproduct multistage batch plants are characterized by the production of multiple products having similar recipes. Many approaches have been presented in the last two decades for the short-term scheduling of these facilities. To bridge the gap between theory and practice recent contributions have addressed features that can be found in industrial environments, such as sequence-dependent changeover times, intermediate due-dates, various types of limited renewable resources, etc. (Marchetti and Cerdá, 2009), as well as large-scale problems (Castro et al., 2009; Kopanos et al, 2010). However, these contributions assume that each product order comprises a single batch. This assumption does not always hold in practice since orders comprising multiple batches of the same product are many times handled in industry. Even more, sometimes two or more multiple-batch orders of the same product, which may have different due dates, have to be acknowledged within the specified time horizon. To our knowledge there is no approach that can address these challenges. This work presents a novel constraint programming (CP) approach that can tackle the issues previously described.