Planning and scheduling in the process industry

Since there has been tremendous progress in planning and scheduling in the process industry during the last 20 years, it might be worthwhile to give an overview of the current state-of-the-art of planning and scheduling problems in the chemical process industry. This is the purpose of the current review which has the following structure: we start with some conceptional thoughts and some comments on special features of planning and scheduling problems in the process industry. In Section 2 the focus is on planning problems while in Section 3 different types of scheduling problems are discussed. Section 4 presents some solution approaches especially those applied to benchmark problem which has received considerable interest during the last years. Section 5 allows a short view into the future of planning and scheduling. In the appendix we describe the Westenberger–Kallrath problem which has already been used extensively as a benchmark problem for planning and scheduling in the process industry.