Scheduling Scarce Resources in Chemical Engineering

The efficient utilization of scarce resources, such as machines or manpower, is major challenge within production planning in the chemical industry. We describe solution methods for a resource-constrained scheduling problem which arises at a production facility at basf ag in ludwigshafen. We have developed and implemented two different algorithms to solve this problem, an approach which is based on lagrangian relaxation, as well as a branch-and-bound procedure. Particularly the lagrangian approach is applicable for a whole variety of resourceconstrained scheduling problems, hence it is of interest not only for the specific problem we describe, but also for many other industrial applications. In this paper, we describe both approaches, and also report on computational results, based upon practical problem instances as well as benchmark test sets.keywordsschedule problemfeasible solutiontemporal constraintproject schedulelagrangian relaxationthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.