An extended dispatching rule approach in an on-line scheduling framework for batch process management

Short-term scheduling of batch processes in an on-line scheduling framework is a difficult problem because of the complexity and dynamic behaviour of batch processes. In this paper, an on-line scheduling framework for batch process management and a dispatching-simulation mechanism for short-term scheduling in the framework are presented. Moreover, an extended dispatching rule approach, which applies different dispatching rule combinations in the mechanism, and a search algorithm to find an appropriate dispatching rule combination with reasonable computational effort, are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the search algorithm are demonstrated on an example multiproduct batch process model.