Sequence-dependent batch chemical scheduling with earliness and tardiness penalties

Production volume in the specialized agricultural chemical industry is typically too small to justify the capital expenditure required for continuous processing. As such, there is a trend towards building chemical processing plants for this market segment that are batch plants. Scheduling of this type of chemical plant under just-in-time operations, where both earliness and lateness penalties are included, is critical to the efficient operation of these plants. In this paper, a heuristic scheduling procedure is developed for the problem of minimizing the total weighted earliness and tardiness costs as well as the total set-up cost for the single-stage batch chemical manufacturing environment.