A New Formation and Solution for Batch Chemical Process Stochastic Scheduling with Uncertain Processing Time

Scheduling for chemical batch process has been an active area of research over the past decade. The uncertainties of the process, which expand the scope and complexity, make the formulation and solution of the stochastic scheduling very intractable. This paper proposed a novel mathematical formulation which combined statistical probability theory with the deterministic scheduling; the discretion of the stochastic variables can be used to alleviate this difficulty and complexity. An example of batch process stochastic scheduling with uncertain processing time of uniform distribution indicated that the relationship between the deadline and the probability of optimal scheduling, and the distribution of the makespan of the optimal scheduling was studied. Result indicated the method is effective and reasonable.