Abstract
Effective scheduling of operations in batch plants has a great potential for high economic returns, in which formulation and optimal solution algorithm are the main issues of study. This study aims to investigate petri-net based approaches to ultimately accommodate complex scheduling problems (such as mixed batch continuous plants) where traditional techniques have difficulties in dealing with. The timed petri-net based heuristic search algorithms for short-term scheduling of batch plants are explored. Theoretical results will be applied to the simulation case studies.