Short-term Scheduling of a Multipurpose Batch Plant Considering Degradation Effects

Abstract

Fouling is a typical type of degradation in the process industries, which results in significant negative effects on the efficiency of plants. This paper considers a case study, where production tasks with different recipes contribute to the batch-to-batch fouling evolution depending on their sequence. The scheduling of the production tasks is improved by explicit consideration of the degradation effects, resulting in an optimized production sequence. A set of continuous-time MILP-based scheduling models integrated with degradation models are employed to formulate this batch scheduling problem. The proposed formulations are tested for different problem sizes of the case study illustrating the effectiveness of each of the proposed approaches.