Multi-week MILP scheduling for an ice cream processing facility

This paper presents a multi-week mixed integer linear programming (MILP) scheduling model for an ice cream processing facility. The ice cream processing is a typical complex food manufacturing process and a simplified version of this processing has been adapted to investigate scheduling problems in the literature. Most of these models only considered the production scheduling for a week. In this paper, multi-week production scheduling is considered. The problem has been implemented as an MILP model. The model has been tested on a set of cases from the literature, and its results were compared to the results of problems solved using hybrid MILP-heuristics methods in the literature. The inclusion of cleanup session, weekend break and semi-processed product from previous week were also assessed with two additional sets of experiments. The experiments result show that the proposed MILP is able to handle multi-week scheduling efficiently and effectively within a reasonable time limit. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.