Incorporation of flexibility in scheduling decision-making

Uncertainty is a very important factor in process operations. In this paper, a systematic framework is developed to address the problem of accounting for uncertainty in the scheduling decision-making process. The objectives are to increase the schedule flexibility prior to its execution and identify the important parameters and their effects into the scheduling performance. Two approaches are proposed: robust optimization and inference-based sensitivity analysis. The proposed formulation incorporates the consideration of solution robustness and model robustness. Examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach in batch plant scheduling.