A multiple-criteria scheduling method for planning of continuous manufacturing processes - A food industry case study

The main objectives of Food Industry nowadays, are to insure the high quality of their products, to provide uninterruptedly the market with products, as well as to reduce production costs. The large number of final products, the continuous manufacturing processes and the noninterruptible order processing, together with the sensitivity of raw materials/products and the very short product life-span, are the most common planning problems faced by the Food Industry, especially in the field of dairy production. This paper describes the application of a scheduling and synchronization method to the production planning problem of a Typical Food Factory. The objective of this work is to develop a method for supporting the scheduling procedures and for synchronizing the schedules of the different production stages. This method, based on a multiple-criteria decision making technique, provides a complete resource allocation schedule for each one of the production stages, as well as a set of performance indices for each of them in order for the schedule evaluation to become feasible. A set of static, dynamic and combined dispatching heuristics has also been incorporated in this method. An algorithm for the synchronization of the partial schedules for the production departments has been developed. A set of experiments was designed and carried out in order to evaluate the method. The multicriteria scheduling method is compared with the dispatching heuristics applied to a simulated environment and the results are discussed. For these experiments realistic data coming from the Food industry is used.