Food production in batch manufacturing systems with multiple shared-common resources: A scheduling model and its application in the yoghurt industry

The industry-specific characteristics of food-processing make production scheduling a hard and complex issue. Food processing has involved relatively minor concerns in several scheduling researches. In this paper, the authors address the integrated lot sizing and scheduling problem in batch production systems and propose a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation with multiple objective functions. The considered production system contains semi-continues flow lines with series-parallel machines fed by parallel shared common resources. The model has been numerically and empirically validated using six weekly demand plan of a dairy company. The results demonstrate that both the operational cost and total completion time has been optimised.