Flexible Recipe Method and Decomposition Algorithm for Integrating Production Operations and Dynamic Optimization of Continuous Manufacturing Processes

For the continuous manufacturing processes, the integrated optimization for production planning, scheduling, and dynamic optimization usually leads to profit improvement and better overall performance. The challenge is that the integrated optimization is often a large scale problem which is difficult to solve. To deal with the computational difficulty of the integrated problem, we first propose a flexible recipe method which decomposes the integrated problem into an integrated planning and scheduling problem with flexible recipes and a set of dynamic optimization problems. To further enhance the computational efficiency, a bi-level decomposition algorithm is then applied to the integrated planning and scheduling problem with flexible recipes. The computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through case studies of methyl methacrylate (MMA) polymerization processes.