| 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 beers, 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 to two fundamental problems: (i) the batch production scheduling problem for perishable products with sequence-independent setup times (BPP-SI) and (ii) the batch production scheduling problem for perishable products with sequence-dependent setup times (BPP-SD).; 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 both problems by formulating them as a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) in discrete time. Computational studies on BPP-SI and BPP-SD for industrial problems are presented. In order to efficiently solve the large BPP-SI problems in practice, we develop five efficient heuristics. The extensive computational results show that the developed heuristics can obtain good solutions for very large problem sizes and require a very short amount of computational time. |
