RTN-BASED ROLLING HORIZON ALGORITHMS FOR MEDIUM-TERM SCHEDULING OF MULTIPURPOSE PLANTS

One of the major advances in the scheduling of multipurpose plants ove r the past decade has been the increasing usage of rigorous mathematic al programming approaches based on increasingly general problem repres entations such as the Resource-Task Network (RTN) Framework recently p roposed by Pantelides (1004). These approaches often require the solut ion of large optimisation problems, the size of which increases with t he length of the time horizon being considered. For medium-term schedu ling problems typically considering time scales ranging from one month to a year, the solution via the direct application of the mathematica l programming techniques mentioned above is very often impossible with the currently available computer hardware and solution methods. This paper presents three ''rolling horizon'' algorithms that are formally based on the rigorous aggregated RTN formulation presented by Wilkinso n (1996).