Planning and scheduling with multiple intermediate due dates - An effective discrete time model formulation

The planning and scheduling of chemical plants still leaves several opportunities for optimization. Therefore, many authors have made contributions to this field, resulting in generally two modeling paradigms: continuous time and discrete time model formulations. As both modeling approaches have their advantages, the model formulation presented here is based on a discrete time scale while, at the same time, taking aspects of time continuity into account. It is shown that the proposed modeling approach compares favorably with three model formulations from the literature. Furthermore, a closer evaluation shows that all these benchmarks suffer from minor flaws.