Scheduling an Industrial Production Facility

Managing an industrial production facility requires carefully allocating limited resources, and gives rise to large, potentially complicated scheduling problems. In this paper we consider a specific instance of such a problem: planning efficient utilization of the facilities and technicians that maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. A detailed study of this problem yields a complicated mixed-integer programming (MIP) model with upward of hundreds of thousands of variables and even more constraints. Consistently and quickly solving such a model exactly is impossible using today's algorithms and computers, and, in addition to branch-and-bound, requires good heuristics and approximation algorithms. In an effort to design such algorithms, we study several different methods of generating good solutions given the solution to the LP relaxation. We design a suite of sample data and test the algorithms. The goals of this project were twofold. First, we wanted to develop a program t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IPCO
• Authors: Eyjolfur Asgeirsson, Jonathan W. Berry, Cynthia A. Phillips, David J. Phillips, Clifford Stein, Joel Wein
• Keywords: Complicated Mixed-integer Programming, IPCO 2004, IPCO 2007, LP Relaxation, NSF Grant DMI-9970063