Computer Science, Amirkabir University of TechnologyModeling of the Batch Production Scheduling Problem for Perishable Products with Independent Setup Times

The focus of this dissertation is problem of batch production scheduling for perishable products with setup times, with the main applications in answering production planning problems faced by manufacturers of perishable products, such as vaccines and yoghurts. The benefits of effective production plans can help companies reduce their total costs substantially to gain competitive advantages without reduction of service level in a globalize economy. We develop concepts and methodologies that are applied the batch production scheduling problem for perishable products with sequence-independent setup times (BPP-SI) by considering warehouse capacity constraints. The problem is that given a set of forecast demand for perishable products to be produced by a set of parallel machines in single stage batch production, with each product having fixed shelf-life times and each machine requiring setup times before producing a batch of product, find the master production schedule which minimizes total cost over a specified time horizon. We present the new models for problem as a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) in discrete time. In order to efficiently solve the large BPP-SI problems in practice, we proposed a Genetic algorithm.