Iterative Medium-Term Production Scheduling of an Industrial Formulation Plant

Abstract In this contribution, a discrete-time medium-term production scheduling model of an industrial formulation plant for crop protection chemicals is presented. As the optimization model has to provide feasible solutions in a real-world environment, all relevant processing characteristics, as e.g. sequence- and unit-dependent changeovers, timing relations between different units and processing tasks or shift patterns must be represented in order to yield feasible and implementable schedules. In order to cope with the computational complexity of the problem, an iterative scheme is employed in which the production orders are scheduled in a sequential fashion. After each iteration a set reduction step is performed, removing all infeasible unit allocations from the feasible set of the next iteration. The proposed framework is tested on a realistic industrial case study.