Tackling perishability in multi-level process industries

Abstract

The classical multi-level lot-sizing and scheduling problem formulations for process industries rarely address perishability issues, such as limited shelf lives of intermediate products. In some industries, ignoring this specificity may result in severe losses. In this paper, we start by extending a classical multi-level lot-sizing and scheduling problem formulation (MLGLSP) to incorporate perishability issues. We further demonstrate that with the objective of minimising the total costs (purchasing, inventory and setup), the production plans generated by classical models are often infeasible under a setting with perishable products. The model distinguishes different perishability characteristics of raw materials, intermediates and end products according to various industries. Finally, we provide quantitative insights on the importance of considering perishability for different production settings when solving integrated production planning and scheduling problems.

Keywords:

• Multi-level production process
• perishability
• production modelling
• lot-sizing and scheduling
• mixed-integer linear programming

Acknowledgements

We thank the associate editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the quality and readability of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Wenchao Wei http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0522-595X

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Fundamental Funds for Humanities and Social Sciences of Beijing Jiaotong University [grant number 2017jbwy004/2015RC094], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71801013/71661167009/71602106/7161101015] and Beijing Social Science Foundation 18GLC078. This research was also partly supported by the project TEC4Growth – Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020, financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Program (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This support is gratefully acknowledged.