Recent trends and challenges in planning and scheduling of chemical-pharmaceutical plants

Abstract

This paper discusses the current trends in optimization methods for solving planning and scheduling problems in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry. The challenges of this industry and the recent advances in modeling these problems show that optimization methods need to provide highly integrated solutions encompassing decision-making at both R&D and Operations levels. The heterogeneous demand, characteristic of the complex drug development cycle, asks for mixed planning strategies capable of increasing the resources utilization and the plant output, and of dealing with uncertainty.