Capacity analysis of multi-product plants integrating energy consumption

The use of multi-product plants for the production of high value goods in the process industry has already reached an impressive level and is still growing. It will be shown that capacity analysis is an often needed task within medium-range planning activities for multi-product plants. Restrictions due to limited supply of energy can have a considerable impact on the result of a capacity analysis and therefore need to be considered in the model. For the generation of maximum capacity schedules the combination of genetic algorithms (GA) with a commercial discrete-event simulation system is proposed. It will be shown that the production in a multi-product plant including resource restrictions can be modeled within the system. A way of coding the variables in a GA will be shown as well. A case study shows that this approach is very promising when strongly limited resources have to be considered. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.