On hybrid method for medium-term multi-product continuous plant scheduling

In this paper, we develop a hybrid approach to solve a production scheduling problem of special type. The approach is based on a general decomposition scheme proposed in earlier studies and is extended by a constructive greedy heuristic for medium term scheduling and a genetic algorithm for solving the auxiliary subproblem on a set of critical (bottleneck) processing units. The experimental study on a large-scale data showed a significant improvement of the solution quality and the solving time comparing to the previously known results, and confirmed the suitability of the proposed approach for the real-life production scheduling.