INCORPORATING ONLINE SCHEDULING STRATEGIES IN INTEGRATED BATCH-PRODUCTION CONTROL

Given a set of product recipes, the main goal of production scheduling is to attain an optimal solution which satisfies the market demand ta king into account a variety of constraints and specific policies. Thus , a schedule is generated capable of accepting certain degree of varia bility during batch production. But, in most cases an on-line adjustme nt to the real conditions is required. In this paper, it is presented a reactive scheduling algorithm, which adapts the current schedule to real time disturbances, integrated to a supervisory system capable of handling the new schedule generated thus, filling the existing gap bet ween high production scheduling and low sequential control levels in t he Chemical Process Industries. Changes of tasks start times and units reassignment are considered in a decision tree level based on heurist ic rules.