Title: Food production in batch manufacturing systems with multiple shared-common resources: a scheduling model and its application in the yoghurt industry

Authors: Mojtaba Khorram Niaki; Fabio Nonino; Alireza Rashidi Komijan; Milad Dehghani

Addresses: Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy ' Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Firoozkooh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Firoozkooh, Iran ' Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy

Abstract: The industry-specific characteristics of food-processing make production scheduling a hard and complex issue. Food processing has involved relatively minor concerns in several scheduling researches. In this paper, the authors address the integrated lot sizing and scheduling problem in batch production systems and propose a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation with multiple objective functions. The considered production system contains semi-continuous flow lines with series-parallel machines fed by parallel shared common resources. The model has been numerically and empirically validated using six weekly demand plan of a dairy company. The results demonstrate that both the operational cost and total completion time has been optimised.

Keywords: food industry; batch production systems; scheduling; lot-sizing; mixed integer linear programming; MILP; dairy company.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2017.084442

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2017 Vol.27 No.3, pp.345 - 365

Received: 03 Oct 2015
Accepted: 26 Dec 2015
Published online: 07 Jun 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article