Production scheduling of flexible plants has receiving growing interest in the last years because of its economical importance. The main objective is to allocate the shared resources as availability of equipments, utilities and manpower, in order to minimize some performance criteria as, for example, makespan, tardiness etc. That problem is classified as computationally hard to handle, and different approaches proposed in the literature are unable to solve large problems. This paper introduces another approach using a Mixed Integer Linear Problem (MILP) formulation based on the State Task Network (STN) representation and the solution is obtained by using logical inference based on shared resources.
chemical systems; batch processes; production scheduling; mathematical programming; logical inference
