Impact of Personnel Allocation on Deterministic Planning and Scheduling

The effect of personnel or operator allocation on batch plant scheduling is presented. The main challenge in dealing with operator allocation is the fact that operators tend to be more qualitative than quantitative, which renders traditional mathematical techniques inadequate. The scheduling model presented in this article takes into consideration the competency of selected and allocated operators. Also presented in this article is a new planning model to determine optimal scheduling time horizons on normal and penalized (holiday or weekend) days, concomitant with the corresponding shift patterns. The difference in basic and overtime payment is taken into account to determine the length of working time of each operator on a given day. Associated with the length of working time is the appropriate shift pattern, given that very long hours may justify more than one shift. The resultant integrated planning and scheduling model is decomposed by exploiting its block angular structure. © 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 50: 999 –1016, 2004

[1]  Lawrence J. Watters.  Letter to the Editor - Reduction of Integer Polynomial Programming Problems to Zero-One Linear Programming Problems , 1967, Oper. Res..

[2]  Joseph F. Pekny,et al.  Application of distributed computing to batch plant design and scheduling , 1996 .

[3]  Joseph F. Pekny,et al.  The curse of reality — why process scheduling optimization problems are difficult in practice , 2000 .

[4]  Thokozani Majozi,et al.  A combined fuzzy set theory and MILP approach in integration of planning and scheduling of batch plants - Personnel evaluation and allocation , 2005, Comput. Chem. Eng..

[5]  Maria Teresa Moreira Rodrigues,et al.  Short-term planning and scheduling in multipurpose batch chemical plants: a multi-level approach , 2000 .

[6]  S. L. Hung,et al.  Development of a workforce management system for a customer hotline service , 2000, Comput. Oper. Res..

[7]  D. Rippin,et al.  The Choice of Equipment Sizes for Multiproduct Batch Plants. Heuristics vs. Branch and Bound , 1975 .

[8]  R. Sargent,et al.  Optimum Design of Multipurpose Chemical Plants , 1979 .

[9]  R. Sargent,et al.  A general algorithm for short-term scheduling of batch operations */I , 1993 .

[10]  Nicholas Beaumont,et al.  Scheduling staff using mixed integer programming , 1997 .

[11]  F. Glover.  IMPROVED LINEAR INTEGER PROGRAMMING FORMULATIONS OF NONLINEAR INTEGER PROBLEMS , 1975 .

[12]  Matthew H. Bassett,et al.  Decomposition techniques for the solution of large-scale scheduling problems , 1996 .

[13]  Richard S. H. Mah,et al.  Optimal design of multipurpose batch plants , 1982 .

[14]  David W. Ashley.  A spreadsheet optimization system for library staff scheduling , 1995, Comput. Oper. Res..

[15]  C. Floudas,et al.  Effective Continuous-Time Formulation for Short-Term Scheduling. 1. Multipurpose Batch Processes , 1998 .

[16]  R. Sargent,et al.  The optimal operation of mixed production facilities—a general formulation and some approaches for the solution , 1996 .

[17]  Turgut Aykin,et al.  A comparative evaluation of modeling approaches to the labor shift scheduling problem , 2000, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[18]  I. K. Altinel,et al.  General continuous time models for production planning and scheduling of batch processing plants: mixed integer linear program formulations and computational issues , 2001 .

[19]  G. Reklaitis,et al.  Mathematical programming formulation for scheduling of batch operations based on nonuniform time discretization , 1997 .

[20]  Donald E. Shobrys,et al.  Planning, scheduling and control systems: why cannot they work together , 2000 .

[21]  Michael J. Brusco,et al.  A sequential integer programming method for discontinuous labor tour scheduling , 1996 .

[22]  X. Zhu,et al.  A Novel Continuous-Time MILP Formulation for Multipurpose Batch Plants. 1. Short-Term Scheduling , 2001 .

[23]  C. Pantelides,et al.  A simple continuous-time process scheduling formulation and a novel solution algorithm , 1996 .

[24]  X. Zhu,et al.  Novel continuous time MILP formulation for multipurpose batch plants. 2. Integrated planning and scheduling , 2001 .

[25]  A. G. Lagodimos,et al.  Greedy heuristic algorithms for manpower shift planning , 2000 .