Integrated Operational Planning and Medium-Term Scheduling for Large-Scale Industrial Batch Plants

The operational planning and the medium-term scheduling of a multipurpose and multiproduct batch chemical plant are inter-related activities that involve the allocation of plant resources. Because of their disparate time scales, however, the effective integration of planning and scheduling has proven to be a formidable task. The lack of an integrative framework for planning and scheduling will invariably cause the planning model to provide unrealistic production targets to the scheduling level, leading to the misallocation of plant resources. In response to this issue, a novel framework for the integration of planning and scheduling for a multipurpose and multiproduct batch plant is presented. The framework entails integrating a novel planning with production disaggregation model with a medium-term scheduling model through a forward-rolling horizon approach.