Computers & Chemical Engineering, Vol.33, No.10, 1644-1660, 2009
A novel network-based continuous-time representation for process scheduling: Part II. General framework
In the first part of this series of papers we presented a new network-based continuous-time representation for the short-term scheduling of batch processes, which overcomes numerous shortcomings of existing approaches. In this second part, we discuss how this representation can be extended to address aspects such as: (i) preventive maintenance activities on unary resources (e.g., processing and storage units) that were planned ahead of time; (it) resource-constrained changeover activities on processing and shared storage units; (iii) non-instantaneous resource-constrained material transfer activities; (iv) intermediate deliveries of raw materials and shipments of finished products at predefined times: and (v) scenarios where part of the schedule is fixed because it has been programmed in the previous scheduling horizon. The proposed integrated framework can be used to address a wide variety of process scheduling problems, many of which are intractable with existing tools. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Process scheduling;Network-based continuous-time representation;Mixed-integer linear programming