Although planning and scheduling optimization have been explored in the literature for many years now, it still remains a hot topic in the current scientific research. The changing market trends, globalization, technical and technological progress, and sustainability considerations make it necessary to deal with new optimization challenges in modern manufacturing, engineering, and healthcare systems. This book provides an overview of the recent advances in different areas connected with operations research models and other applications of intelligent computing techniques used for planning and scheduling optimization. The wide range of theoretical and practical research findings reported in this book confirms that the planning and scheduling problem is a complex issue that is present in different industrial sectors and organizations and opens promising and dynamic perspectives of research and development.

This book introduces readers to the many variables and constraints involved in planning and scheduling complex systems, such as airline flights and university courses. Students will become acquainted with the necessity for scheduling activities under conditions of limited resources in industrial and service environments, and become familiar with methods of problem solving. Written by an expert author with decades of teaching and industry experience, the book provides a comprehensive explanation of the mathematical foundations to solving complex requirements, helping students to understand underlying models, to navigate software applications more easily, and to apply sophisticated solutions to project management. This is emphasized by real-world examples, which follow the components of the manufacturing process from inventory to production to delivery. Undergraduate and graduate students of industrial engineering, systems engineering, and operations management will find this book useful in understanding optimization with respect to planning and scheduling.

This book presents a number of efficient techniques for solving large-scale production scheduling and planning problems in process industries. The main content is supplemented by a wealth of illustrations, while case studies on large-scale industrial applications, ranging from continuous to semicontinuous and batch processes, round out the coverage. The book examines a variety of complex, real-world problems, and demonstrates solutions that are applicable to scenarios and countries around the world. Specifically, these case studies include: • the production planning of the bottling stage of a major brewery at the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma (Heineken Int) in Mexico;• the production scheduling for multi-stage semicontinuous processes at an ice-cream production facility of Unilever in the Netherlands;• the resource-constrained production planning for the yogurt production line at the KRI KRI dairy production facility in Greece; and• the production scheduling for large-scale, multi-stage batch processes at a pharmaceutical batch plant in Germany. In addition, the book includes industrial-inspired case studies of: • the simultaneous planning of production and logistics operations considering multi-site facilities for semicontinuous processes; and• the integrated planning of production and utility systems in process industries under uncertainty. Solving Large-scale Production Scheduling and Planning in the Process Industries offers a valuable reference guide for researchers and decision-makers alike, as it shows readers how to evaluate and improve existing installations, and how to design new ones. It is also well suited as a textbook for advanced courses on production scheduling and planning in industry, as it addresses the optimization of production and logistics operations in real-world process industries.

This book focuses on planning and scheduling applications. Planning and scheduling are forms of decision-making that play an important role in most manufacturing and services industries. The planning and scheduling functions in a company typically use analytical techniques and heuristic methods to allocate its limited resources to the activities that have to be done. The application areas considered in this book are divided into manufacturing applications and services applications. The book covers five areas in manufacturing: project scheduling, job shop scheduling, scheduling of flexible assembly systems, economic lot scheduling, and planning and scheduling in supply chains. It covers four areas in services: reservations and timetabling, tournament scheduling, planning and scheduling in transportation, and workforce scheduling. At the end of each chapter, a case study or a system implementation is described in detail. Numerous examples and exercises throughout the book illustrate the material presented. The fundamentals concerning the methodologies used in the application chapters are covered in the appendices. The book comes with a CD-ROM that contains various sets of powerpoint slides. The CD also contains several planning and scheduling systems that have been developed in academia as well as generic optimization software that has been developed in industry. This book is suitable for more advanced students in industrial engineering and operations research as well as graduate students in business. Michael Pinedo is the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management in the Stern School of Business at New York University. His research interests lie in the theoretical and applied aspects of planning and scheduling. He has written numerous papers on the theory of deterministic and stochastic scheduling and has also consulted extensively in industry. He has been actively involved in the development of several large industrial planning and scheduling systems.

Pinedo is a major figure in the scheduling area (well versed in both stochastics and combinatorics) , and knows both the academic and practitioner side of the discipline. This book includes the integration of case studies into the text. It will appeal to engineering and business students interested in operations research.

This book presents a unified optimal control approach to a large class of problems arising in the field of production planning and scheduling. It introduces a leading optimal flow control paradigm which results in efficient solutions for planning and scheduling problems. This book also introduces the reader to analytical and numerical methods of the maximum principle, used here as a mathematical instrument in modeling and solving production planning and scheduling problems. The book examines control of production flows rather than sequencing of distinct jobs. Methodologically, this paradigm allows us to progress from initial assumptions about a manufacturing environment, through mathematical models and construction of numerical methods, up to practical applications which prove the relevance of the theory developed here to the real world. Given a manufacturing system, the goal is to control the production, subject to given constraints, in such a way that the demands are tracked as closely as possible. The book considers a wide variety of problems encountered in actual production planning and scheduling. Among the problems are production flow sequencing and timing, capacity expansion and deterioration, subcontracting and overtime. The last chapter is entirely devoted to applications of the theory to scheduling production flows in real-life manufacturing systems. The enclosed disk provides software implementations of the developed methods with easy, convenient user interface. We aimed this book at a student audience - final year undergraduates as weIl as master and Ph. D.

Construction Scheduling, Cost Optimization and Management presents a general mathematical formula for the scheduling of construction projects. Using this formula, repetitive and non-repetitive tasks, work continuity considerations, multiple-crew strategies, and the effects of varying job conditions on the performance of a crew can be modelled.L This book presents an entirely new approach to the construction scheduling problem. It provides a practical methodology which will be of great benefit to all those involved in construction scheduling and cost optimization, including construction engineers, highway engineers, transportation engineers, contractors and architects. It will also be useful for researchers, and graduates on courses in construction scheduling and planning.