SCHEDULING OF MULTIPURPOSE BATCH CHEMICAL-PLANTS WITH RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS

The objective of this paper is to develop an efficient scheduling procedure for multipurpose batch chemical plants with resource constraints. The scheduling problem subject to resource restrictions is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model which is characterized by high combinatorial complexity and nonconvexity. These features are the main obstacles to the direct application of conventional optimization methods for the solution of the proposed model. Consequently, a two-level decomposition strategy is introduced which significantly mitigates the computational requirements associated with the solution of the MINLP model. The effectiveness of the proposed model and solution strategy is illustrated with a number of test examples.