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Scheduling dispensing and counting in secondary pharmaceutical manufacturing
Author(s) -
Ciavotta Michele,
Meloni Carlo,
Pranzo Marco
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.11725
Subject(s) - scheduling (production processes) , pharmaceutical manufacturing , adaptability , job shop scheduling , modularity (biology) , computer science , mathematical optimization , industrial engineering , distributed computing , operations research , engineering , mathematics , embedded system , ecology , bioinformatics , genetics , routing (electronic design automation) , biology
In this article, we describe a general methodology for operations scheduling in dispensing and counting departments of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants. The departments are modeled as a multiobjective parallel machines scheduling problem under a number of both standard and realistic constraints, such as release times, due dates and deadlines, particular sequence‐dependent setup times, machine unavailabilities, and maximum campaign size. Main characteristics of the methodology are the modularity of the solution algorithms, the adaptability to different objectives and constraints to fulfill production requirements, the easiness of implementation, and the ability of incorporating human experience in the scheduling algorithms. Computational experience carried out on two case studies from a real pharmaceutical plant shows the effectiveness of this approach. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009