A general resource-constrained short-term scheduling model for multipurpose batch plants using synchronous slots

Abstract

Short-term scheduling of multipurpose batch plants is a challenging problem for which several formulations exist in the literature. In these plants, there are many kinds of resource constraints which often lead these problems even tougher. Based on the work of Sundaramoorthy & Karimi (2005), we extend the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to the problems with different kinds of resource constraints. Due to the same continuous-time representation with synchronous slots with the original formulation, our extended formulation with fewer binary variables, constraints, and nonzeros seems to have good efficiency for these tough problems. Finally, several examples will be illustrated to demonstrate the superiority of our model.