No label defined (Q4795376)

The authors deal with optimization of the production process by applying methods based on operations research. More precisely, this problem is multi product batch processing in the chemical industry, where processing starts with a set of raw materials from which a given set of final products being produced by a sequence of chemical processes. The authors consider only the problem of finding a feasible production schedule with minimum make span. This leads towards mixed integer linear program MIP. Six optimization strategies are introduced and discussed, some of them based on different heuristics. The authors present the evaluation of all the optimization strategies based on benchmark problems described by Westenberger and Kallrath, finding the best strategies among studied. They also compare their heuristics with other approaches known from the literature, concluding that their strategies produce, for most of the test problems, the best solutions known so far.