Single-stage scheduling of multiproduct batch plants: An edible-oil deodorizer case study

This article considers the short-term scheduling of a single-stage batch edible-oil deodorizer that can process multiple products in several product groups. Sequence-dependent changeovers occur when switching from one product group to another. Based on the incorporation of products into product groups, mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models are proposed for two scenarios, with and without backlogs. Then, the models are successfully applied to a real-world case with 70 product orders over a 128-h planning horizon. Compared with a literature model developed for a similar problem, the proposed models exhibit significantly better performance.