An application of a planning and scheduling multi-model approach in the chemical industry

In this paper, we are concerned with the production planning and scheduling of process industries. A real life application stems from the chemical industry where the production environment is subject to uncertainty, delays and interferences. We propose a multi-model based system for planning and scheduling in such a process industry. The multi-model system is defined as an architecture integrating expert system techniques, discrete event simulation, optimization algorithms and heuristics to support decision-making for complex production planning and scheduling problems. The system has been successfully tested and used to help in production planning and scheduling. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.