An approach to process production reactive scheduling

Process manufacturing has some characteristics that make it different from other types of industry. In practice, there are many examples of process industrial settings where production resources are shared and there is no intermediate storage between two processing units. Perhaps the most important issue usually to be excluded from the academic discussion of process production scheduling/control problems is the uncertainty of the duration of real chemical processes. These properties of process manufacturing result in blocking, no-wait, and other constraints that must be taken into account during designing the production scheduling system. The first part of the paper addresses some features of process manufacturing and their influence on production scheduling. The main part of the paper analyzes the scheduling problems under the presence of typical process constraints and unpredictable process duration times and introduces a simple and reliable approach to avoid these problems. The proposed concept is presented on a case study of an industrial two-stage washing batch subprocess. It is considered that the presented approach would be relatively easy to implement in a process production scheduling system and that it can contribute to more effective process production scheduling.