SIMULTANEOUS DESIGN, LAYOUT AND SCHEDULING OF PIPELESS BATCH PLANTS

Pipeless batch plants rely on mobile vessels for the transfer of mater ial from one stage of processing to another. Their design interacts st rongly with plant layout, as the latter largely determines the require d time for each transfer. Design and layout must therefore be consider ed simultaneously. Furthermore, detailed considerations of plant sched uling must be taken into account at the design stage in order to ensur e that any resources incorporated in the design are used as efficientl y as possible. This paper presents a mathematical formulation of the c ombined design, layout and scheduling problem for pipeless plants. A r igorous decomposition procedure is proposed for the solution of the re sulting mixed integer programming problem.