Solving Large-Scale Production Scheduling and Planning in the Process Industries

This book presents a number of efficient techniques for solving large-scale production scheduling and planning problems in process industries. The main content is supplemented by a wealth of illustrations, while case studies on large-scale industrial applications, ranging from continuous to semicontinuous and batch processes, round out the coverage.


The book examines a variety of complex, real-world problems, and demonstrates solutions that are applicable to scenarios and countries around the world. Specifically, these case studies include:


• the production planning of the bottling stage of a major brewery at the Cervecería     Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma (Heineken Int) in Mexico;
• the production scheduling for multi-stage semicontinuous processes at an ice-cream   production facility of Unilever in the Netherlands;
• the resource-constrained production planning for the yogurt production line at the KRI KRI dairy production facility in Greece; and
• the production scheduling for large-scale, multi-stage batch processes at a pharmaceutical batch plant   in Germany.


In addition, the book includes industrial-inspired case studies of:


• the simultaneous planning of production and logistics operations considering multi-site  facilities for semicontinuous processes; and
• the integrated planning of production and utility systems in process industries under uncertainty.



Solving Large-scale Production Scheduling and Planning in the Process Industries offers a valuable reference guide for researchers and decision-makers alike, as it shows readers how to evaluate and improve existing installations, and how to design new ones. It is also well suited as a textbook for advanced courses on production scheduling and planning in industry, as it addresses the optimization of production and logistics operations in real-world process industries.

Georgios M. Kopanos is a Senior Scientist and the Optimisation Leader at Flexciton Ltd (United Kingdom). He holds an MSc in Engineering and Management of Energy Resources from the University of Western Macedonia (Greece), and a PhD from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain) sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education. He was a Postgraduate Research Associate in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London (United Kingdom), an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan), and later a Lecturer in Process Systems Engineering at Cranfield University (United Kingdom). He has solved successfully large-scale production planning and scheduling problems for major industries from several sectors, such as food industries (including dairy as well as meat and fish processing industries), breweries, pharmaceuticals industries, textile industries, detergents industries, combined heat and power plants, and air separation plants.


Dr. Luis Puigjaner is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and Senior Director of the Centre for Process and Environmental Engineering (CEPIMA) at UPC, a non-profit agency for engineering services and environment audit. He graduated with honours obtaining the B.S.E.E. and M.S. (Engineering) from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya and the Ph.D. degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He holds also M.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Houston (Fulbright outstanding scholar achievement award) and University of Barcelona respectively. Professional experience includes teaching and research: NASA-Houston; Purdue U; U California-Berkeley; U California-Davis; IBM-San Jose Res Center; Stanford U; M.I.T.; Max Planck Institute; King’s College London; U of Houston; Imperial College London; Cork Tech College; UNAM; UNICAMP; Hungarian Aca Sciences; Russian Aca. Sciences. Guest lecturer (Laudatio), Technishe Universität Dortmund (2012). Doctor Honoris Causa, UPB, Bucharest (2017). He has been Responsible scientist and partner leader: 45 EU sponsored projects (Programs JOULE, ESPRIT, BRITE, ECSC, APAS, GROWTH, IMS, IST INCO and FP7); 2 US-Spain projects; 37 national projects (CAICYT, CICYT, CIRIT, CEDETI, PROFIT, P4, Generalitat de Catalunya); over 100 projects industry supported; 26 TEMPUS and INTAS actions. Main research interests include Process Systems Engineering, Computer Aided Process Engineering and Biological Systems modeling simulation and optimization. He is the founder of CIMADE a leader Spin-off Company, which successfully commercialized MOPP & BOLD, the most advanced software created early 1995 for Design and Retrofit, Planning and Scheduling at large industrial scale, for batch, semi-continuous and continuous applications successfully implanted, by Companies like Bayer, Coca-Cola, DAMM, Francolor, Punto Blanco, etc. Academic aplications include, Purdue University, UPC.