< Back to previous page

Project

Introducing the concept of responsive and reliable delivery lead times in the strategic design of batch production plants for the chemical industry.

Over the years, design models for production plants were mainly based on optimising capital and operational costs. Nowadays, responsive delivery lead times and reliable delivery are state-of-theart and equally important strategic management objectives.The aim of this project is to incorporate the supply chain performance attributes "responsiveness" and "reliability" into the mathematical optimisation models for strategic design of chemical batch production plants. At strategic level, the design of such batch plants defines the configuration (number and size of batch equipment), the size of the production batches for the different products and the production planning policy to be used. Depending on the production environment (Make-To-Order or Make-To-Stock), mode of operation (cyclic or non-cyclic) and design options (parallel equipment, dedicated and temporary storage tanks, or parallel production lines), different models will be defined. Small design problems will be optimised with exact mathematical programming techniques. For real size problems, efficient metaheuristics will be developped. Finally, the outcome of the different models will be used to align the appropriateness of strategic choices in plant design with specific business circumstances.
Date:1 Jan 2019 →  31 Dec 2022
Keywords:INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY, OPERATIONS RESEARCH, OPERATIONS STRATEGY, OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
Disciplines:Business economics, Industrial economics, Operations research and mathematical programming, Mathematical methods, programming models, mathematical and simulation modelling