An Efficient Global Event-Based Continuous-Time Formulation for the Short-Term Scheduling of Multipurpose Batch Plants

In the last decade, the PSE community has achieved remarkable results in relation to the problem of short-term scheduling of batch processes. Numerous optimization models, able to solve different problem variants, have been reported. Currently, the great majority of the formulations adopt a continuoustime approach given its advantages over other alternative representations. This contribution presents a simple continuous-time formulation based on the global event concept that relies on general sequencing and precedence constraints. Computational results show that the proposed formulation outperforms other continuous-time approaches without affecting the solution quality.