Uncertainty appears in all the different levels of the industry from the detailed process description to multisite manufacturing. The successful utilization of process models relies heavily on the ability to handle system variability. Thus modeling and managing uncertainty in process planning and scheduling has received a lot of attention in the open literature in recent years from chemical eng...

Due to the increase of a variety of demands from downstream customers, the enterprises are necessary to expand more capacity of their factories by way of adding more plants or outsourcing. Many enterprises encounter great difficulties in production planning because manufacturing environments have changed from traditional single-plant to current multi-plants. Therefore, the company may possess m...

Planning and scheduling of batch and semi-continuous plants involving problem formulation, information flow and solution methodologies are the subject of numerous publications during the last two decades. A typical planning problem includes hundreds of different products produced utilizing a variety of process unit operations over a time horizon of several weeks to few months. The mathematical ...

Conventional approach to solving scheduling problems using constraint technology is based on a static formulation of the problem; in particular all the scheduled activities are expected to be known in advance. Such static formulation is not capable to solve many real-life planning and scheduling problems where the appearance of the activity depends on allocation of other activities during sched...

We consider a complex scheduling problem in the chemical process industry involving batch production. The application described comprises a network of production plants with interdependent production schedules, multi–stage production at multi–purpose facilities, and chain production. The paper addresses three distinct aspects: (i) a scheduling solution obtained from a genetic algorithm based op...

In this paper, production planning and scheduling problems are addressed through a hierarchical framework. The planning problem aggregates orders in the planning period and considers uncertainty utilizing a multi-stage stochastic programming formulation where three stages are considered with increasing level of uncertainty. The planning model includes material balances and time horizon constrai...

The advances of production technologies reflect a worldwide trend for sustainability and rational use of resources. As a consequence, some movements for industry reorganization can be observed in geographically dispersed systems with new productive systems (PSs) configurations. These PSs work with small and medium size production lots, product families with increasing variety, and hard delivery...