Using Grid Computing to Solve Hard Planning and Scheduling Problems

Production planning and scheduling problems routinely arise in process industries. In spite of extensive research work to develop efficient scheduling methods, existing approaches are inefficient in solving industrial-scale problems in reasonable time. In this paper we develop a dynamic decomposition scheme that exploits the structure of the problem and facilitates grid computing. We consider the problem of simultaneous batching and scheduling of multi-stage batch processes. The proposed method can be used to solve hard problems on a grid computer to optimality in reasonable time.