Optimization for the cyclic scheduling of polyamide staple fiber plants

This paper addresses the problem of optimizing cyclic schedules in polyamide staple fiber plants. The problem concerns the scheduling of a production consist of two sequence of stages each involving one production line that are interconnected by intermediate warehouse. A mixed integer programming (MILP) model for cyclic schedules in polyamide staple fiber plants is formulated according to traveling salesman problem (TSP). The objective function of the problem is minimization of sum of costs for changeover and for holding inventory. The MILP formulation was applied to a real world manufacturing facility and solved by a tabu search (TS) algorithm and improved TS algorithm. The computational results are compared to manual in the plant and verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed methods.