PROSPECTS FOR INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL OF TOTAL SITES IN THEBATCH MANUFACTURING-INDUSTRY

A number of production control concepts for the discrete manufacturing and assembly industries have been developed and also extended to the chemical process industries. However some of the basic aspects of batc h processes are not adequately handled by standard commercial software . In this work a summary is made of industrial requirements. Then, we focus in the underlying philosophy of our present solution approach. T hree main areas of improvement in the management of batch processes ar e described: realistic and detailed representation of plant operations , appropriate decision-making structures allowing for the design, anal ysis, validation and scheduling, monitoring and control of plant opera tion strategies, and process integration concepts. An illustrative exa mple will be used to show the progress made and future direction of ou r work is indicated. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.