Planning and scheduling in process industries considering industry-specific characteristics

PhD ceremony: Mr. O.A. Kilic, 11.00 uur, Aula Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Planning and scheduling in process industries considering industry-specific characteristics

Promotor(s): prof. D.P. van Donk, prof. J. Wijngaard

Faculty: Economics and Business

The process industry has experienced growing logistical demands, growing variety in products, and more intense competition. These all together have steered the industry towards a strong focus on efficient planning and scheduling practices. The process industry has a specific set of product and process characteristics which have significant impacts on the management of production operations. These involve considerations regarding raw material availability and yield, flexible product recipes, perishable materials, traceability requirements, storage capacity limitations, and production setups. These characteristics are practically important for their own sakes. However, in many production environments, a subset of these appears together. Therefore, planning and scheduling often concerns the combination of several industry-specific characteristics and also the interactions between them. The literature offers a variety of models and methods which take into account these characteristics individually. Nevertheless, the relationship between them has not been fully addressed. The research presented in this thesis can be regarded as an attempt to fill this gap. It addresses particular problems of practical interest originating from specific production environments, and present new integrative approaches thereof while making use of both optimal and heuristic procedures based on well-grounded optimization methods.