A new approach for scheduling of multipurpose batch processes with unlimited intermediate storage policy

Abstract

The increasing demand of goods, the high competitiveness in the global marketplace as well as the need to minimize the ecological footprint lead multipurpose batch process industries to seek ways to maximize their productivity with a simultaneous reduction of raw materials and utility consumption and efficient use of processing units. Optimal scheduling of their processes can lead facilities towards this direction. Although a great number of mathematical models have been developed for such scheduling, they may still lead to large model sizes and computational time. In this work, we develop two novel mathematical models using the unit-specific event-based modelling approach in which consumption and production tasks related to the same states are allowed to take place at the same event points. The computational results demonstrate that both proposed mathematical models reduce the number of event points required. The proposed unit-specific event-based model is the most efficient since it both requires a smaller number of event points and significantly less computational time in most cases especially for those examples which are computationally expensive from existing models.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

scheduling / multipurpose batch processes / simultaneous transfer / mixed-integer linear programming

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Acknowledgements

Nikolaos Rakovitis would like to acknowledge financial support from the postgraduate award by The University of Manchester. Liping Zhang appreciates financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51875420).

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2019 The Author(s) 2019. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn