Effective Continuous-Time Formulation for Short-Term Scheduling. 2. Continuous and Semicontinuous Processes

Abstract

Part 1 presented a novel continuous-time mathematical formulation for the short-term scheduling of batch processes. Most production networks, however, involve batch and continuous processes. On the basis of the same principles, this paper extends the proposed formulation to describe continuous processes. Two industrial case studies from fast moving consumer goods manufacturing are presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed formulation to describe plants with both batch and continuous processes, to incorporate cleanup requirements, and to consider storage requirements and limitations. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach outperforms all previously proposed continuous-time models for the short-term scheduling of continuous processes.