Reducing Enterprise Wide Planning and Scheduling to Practice

Optimal planning and scheduling of significant maintenance activities such as plant turn-arounds grows in complexity and potential economic impact as the scale of the envelope grows from the local to global. Over the last few years we have invested significant research effort in the development of optimization approaches to handle these large scale problems. In this current paper we will present some accumulated wisdom from the successful implementation of planning and scheduling of turn-arounds from the short-term tactical scheduling to long-term to strategic planning of turn-arounds for integrated manufacturing sites for a global chemical manufacturer. We discuss the challenges of scaling the decision support tool as it moved from planning for a single integrated site to multiple sites across geographies and more network linkages are created with the inclusion of inventories, logistics and market conditions.