Reducing overcapacity in chemical plants by linear programming

In 1993 the Operations Research group of CIBA Ltd. Basle was consulted by a company division to help in finding ways to reduce production costs of their crop protection products. A subsequent study of the production and transportation structure showed an opportunity to reduce the number of production lines dramatically and to reassign the products. Furthermore, since transportation proved to cause a significant part of the overall costs, optimal distribution paths had to be found in the same process. When the relevant cost factors were analyzed, the whole problem was shown to be very well suited for a linear approach, thus enabling us to use an established and powerful tool for the optimization task, Linear Programming.