Short-term scheduling in batch plants: A generic approach with evolutionary computation

This paper presents a program that uses a graphical user interface through which an enduser can describe a batch process using simple building blocks and then develop schedules for it. By allowing the end-user to build cchematics of the target process hardware and write product recipes we can evade the all too common need for a software vendor to build specifically targeted releases for different batch processes; processes that might use common batch-specific hardware which is just connected and/or used in a different manner. Using genetic algorithms as an instrument a software package is presented that is able to target and solve large scheduling problems.