Models and Methods for production scheduling in pharmaceutical industry

In this chapter we study models and methods for production scheduling, and discuss the relationships between scheduling and planning activities with special reference to pharmaceutical manufacturing systems. In common industrial practice, planning and scheduling interact as a loosely coordinated control chain in which the plan determines input data and constraints to be satisfied by the schedule. We report on a practical case study showing that closer coordination can be attained using fast and effective automated scheduling tools. Such tools can be used in the planning activity to generate reliable estimates of the shop floor capacity and thus to produce better production plans. The state of the art and new research directions in this context are discussed