Simultaneous design, layout and scheduling of pipeless batch plants

Pipeless batch plants rely on mobile vessels for the transfer of material from one stage of processing to another. Their design interacts strongly with plant layout, as the latter largely determines the required time for each transfer. Design and layout must therefore be considered simultaneously. Furthermore, detailed considerations of plant scheduling must be taken into account at the design stage in order to ensure that any resources incorporated in the design are used as efficiently as possible. This paper presents a mathematical formulation of the combined design, layout and scheduling problem for pipeless plants. A rigorous decomposition procedure is proposed for the solution of the resulting mixed integer programming problem.