A novel approach to scheduling of zero-wait batch processes under processing time variations

Zero-wait (ZW) is a special type of batch operation in which products are processed without being stored in order to produce a number of low volume high value-added chemical products. Because of its economic impact, there have been a number of studies on the scheduling of ZW processes. However, they are mainly focusing on formulating it into mathematical optimization problems assuming deterministic information. In reality, parameters in the ZW scheduling problem are subject to variation, which may make a fixed schedule suboptimal or even infeasible. Therefore, the scheduling problem has to be solved over and over again using the varying parameters. In order to overcome the inefficiency of such repeated computations, this paper introduces parametric programming technique for solving the ZW scheduling problem under uncertainty. The main advantage using the proposed technique is that a complete map of optimal schedules is obtained as a simple function of varying parameters. A new optimal schedule is thus obtained as a simple function evaluation instead of additional resource-expensive optimization computations. Computational experience with the proposed model and algorithm is presented in the form of two numerical examples.

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