Improving short-term planning by incorporating scheduling consequences

Decisions in short-term planning and scheduling in multi-product multi-purpose plants are often taken in isolation from each other and may be based on conflicting objectives. This may result in decisions that are sub-optimal for the plant as a whole. A more integral perspective on the decision-making could lead to a better overall performance. This paper describes a mathematical reformulation of the short-term planning and scheduling decisions in a bi-level top-down program. It is based on a recursive formula and a smart definition of the cutting rules, which greatly reduces the complexity of the optimization. A practical case shows that the reliability of the planning results increases significantly.