An Efficient Way to Tackle Uncertainty in the Scheduling of a Continuous Evaporation System

In this work a two-stage optimisation method is applied to provide robust schedules in real time for an industrial evaporation system. The scheduler must decide associations between products and plants, individual loads, and the right time to perform cleaning operations. The proposed approach discretises the prediction horizon in days and formulates a mixed-integer linear optimisation problem, where the target is to minimise costs. The schedule must be robust against uncertain external conditions, which may influence the equipment performance. The two-stage approach considers the possibility of reacting in the future once the uncertainty materialises. Thus, computed schedules may provide more savings than a single schedule fulfilling all considered scenarios.