Integrated campaign planning and resource allocation in batch plants

Abstract

In this work, we develop a simple MILP model for simultaneous campaign planning and resource allocation in multi-stage batch plants. We capture several real life scenarios including maintenance planning, product outsourcing, and NPIs and study the effect of various process decisions on the solution of the integrated and resource constrained planning problem. Given the products, their projected demands, and available resources for a given time horizon, our model determines campaign lengths, product schedules on different production lines, and resource allocation profiles. Also, we consider sequence-dependent changeover times between two campaigns. To demonstrate the performance of our mathematical formulation, we consider a case study from a typical multistage specialty chemical batch plant. We validate our approach considering a series of dynamic business scenarios. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.