Automating a manual production scheduling process at a pharmaceutical company

Abstract

We look at the automation of a manual production scheduling process at a pharmaceutical company, by using mixed integer optimization and a simple greedy algorithm. The pharmaceutical company is a make to order producer with highly utilized resources and flexible production processes. We present the algorithms and analyze their performance using real data and compare the results with the manual approach currently used at the company. The results indicate that automated scheduling approaches can be used to improve the production scheduling process, while at the same time reducing the valuable time the human schedulers spend on preparing the production schedules.