Process Systems Engineering Team

Process Systems Engineering Team

(ProSET)

Planning and Scheduling

Production planning and scheduling constitute a crucial part of the overall supply chain decision level pyramid. Planning and scheduling activities are concerned with the allocation over time of scarce resources between competing activities to meet these requirements in an efficient fashion. More specifically, the planning function aims to optimize the economic performance of the enterprise, as it matches production to demand in the best possible way. The production scheduling component is of vital importance as it is the layer which translates the economic imperatives of the plan into a sequence of actions to be executed on the plant floor, so as to deliver the optimized economic performance predicted by the higher level plan Overall, recent research is directed toward finding solutions that enable efficient and accurate handling of problems of large size and increasing complexity. However, there remains significant work to be done on both model enhancements and improvements in solution algorithms, if industrially relevant problems are to be tackled routinely, and software based on these are to be used on a regular basis by practitioners in the field. In addition, new academic developments are mostly tested on complex but relatively small- to medium-size problems. Therefore, the implementation of new production and scheduling approaches in real-life industrial case studies constitutes a challenging task.