Controlling delivery and energy performance of parallel batch processors in dynamic mould manufacturing

Given the mounting concern about service levels and environmental sustainability, mould industry is facing growing pressure to improve delivery reliability and energy efficiency. While heat-treatment operation is a bottleneck that affects related performances in mould manufacturing. Effective production control of this operation is essential to improve the on-time delivery and reduce the energy consumption of the mould. The operation often involves parallel batch processors and incompatible jobs, which allows for simultaneous processing yet with same job family and different weights and due dates. This paper considers the batch process control of parallel processors for dealing with such non-identical jobs in dynamic environments. An event-driven look-ahead batching strategy called MLAB-DE has been proposed. In MLAB-DE, the individual decisions for each family excluding the effects of these decisions on other families are suggested firstly. Then each alternative decision by including its effects on all families is evaluated. MLAB-DE is used to control two kinds of conflicting objectives related to the delivery and energy performances and finally achieve trade-off based on two-level compromise programming model. Simulation study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the MLAB-DE strategy and show that the results are promising as compared to benchmark rules.