Production Scheduling of a Large-Scale Industrial Continuous Plant: Short-Term and Medium-Term Scheduling

In this work, we describe short-term and medium-term scheduling for a large-scale industrial continuous plant. For medium-range scheduling, two sub-problems are solved using a rolling horizon based decomposition scheme. An upper-level model is used to find the optimal number of products, and length of the time horizon to be considered for solving the lower level short-term scheduling problem. At the lower level, we proposed an improved model for short-term scheduling of continuous processes using unit-specific event-based continuous-time representation. The proposed formulation is demonstrated on an industrial large-scale polymer compounding plant comprising several processing and storage units operating in a continuous-mode for producing hundreds of different products over one month time horizon.