SCHEDULING MULTIPURPOSE BATCH PLANTS WITH JUNCTION CONSTRAINTS

There is an increasing trend in the chemical process industry to opera te flexible batch plants because of their capability to manufacture mu ltiple products simultaneously by sharing the same process resources. In this paper, the scheduling of multi-purpose batch chemical plants w ith junction (header) constraints is considered. A mixed-integer non-l inear model for the scheduling of multi-purpose batch chemical plants is formulated that considers the connection between equipment sets, tr ansfer times, variable batch sizes, alternative process plans, and bat ch merging. Because of the computational time complexity of the batch scheduling problem, a heuristic scheduling algorithm that minimizes th e total tardiness is developed to solve the model.