Optimizing campaign sizing policies: an application to a real-life setting.

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated production inventory model that enables to capture the tradeoffs between average inventory, production capacity and customer service level in a semiprocess industry setting. The model includes different features that are specific for such a setting, such as differences in reactor yield and quality requirements across products, the need for cleaning reactors when switching between product types, and the requirement to produce products in campaign sizes that are an integer multiple of the reactor’s batch size. The model can be used to support midterm planning procedures. In this paper, we illustrate the application of the model to real-life data of two product families at a large specialty chemicals company, which for reasons of confidentiality is further referred to as Company C.Queueing; Campaign sizing; (Semi)process industries;