Dutch Focus
Scheduling can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. Its purpose is to minimise the production time and costs by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on what equipment. CAP2M-SCHED is an EU project designed to bring previously developed scheduling tools to market
Increased production efficiency through scheduling tools
AT A GLANCE Project Information
Project Title: CAP2M-SCHED
Project Objective: The demonstration project CAP2M- SCHED is a consequence of the RTD achievements of its pre-cursor CAP-SCHED in which an intelligent scheduling solution was developed, allowing the human operator to interactively set various parameters based on his knowledge, while being assisted at the same time by algorithmic constraint-solving capabilities with domain-specific heuristics.
Project Duration and Timing: 17 months: January 2012 to June 2013
Project Funding: EU 7th Framework Programme, “Capacities : Research for SMEs” Call FP7-SME-2011-CP, Activity 2.3 : “Demonstration Action
CAP-SCHED was an FP7-funded project done within the “Research for the benefit of SMEs”
framework. It involved
groundbreaking, industry-guided research and technological development work in the development of an intelligent scheduling solution
for industrial operations. The
newer CAP2M-SCHED project is now in progress as a direct result of CAP-SCHED, aiming to bring to market the outcome of the original research project. Production
scheduling scheduling by tools help to
maximise operation efficiency and reduce costs,
often outperforming manual methods
automatically
creating efficient schedules that might seem counterintuitive to the untrained eye. Hamid Chehade, general manager of Princeps, explains a little more about the project. “We have taken what has been developed in CAP- SCHED and tested it in real-life cases. Using the algorithms we created, we have now found a way to integrate them with the existing infrastructures of each industry we tested with.” “The initial objective of the proposal was
to provide ready-to-use standalone software for each case. Since we already had the algorithms, we thought we would be able to adapt
them easily to each situation,”
explains Chehade. “However, we discovered that there is actually a huge variety of
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cases; each industry is strikingly different. We made the decision that it would be wiser to have our product as a plugin module. In each case there was already an IT solution for the production management – what they needed was to improve their scheduling process. So now we provide modules that can be used as a plugin.” Many of Princeps’ clients are in the oil
industry, a classic example of a continuous production process. “The
module we
developed for the oil company we tested with linked optimisation and simulation,” says Chehade. “In a refinery you are scheduling through simulation (trial and error). We have developed a way of adjusting some of the operating parameters using our optimisation module.” The batch process testing focused on one process Chehade calls “hybrid
type of
flowshop scheduling”, which combines a mixed integer linear programme with a heuristic approach
that improves
calculation time. The tool was tested in two different case studies: steel bar production and mechanical valve production. Average throughput of steel bars was increased by about 11% while production time was reduced by 10%. Once
found, it
the optimal schedule has been is displayed in an easy to read
Gantt chart, which also displays the
corresponding resource occupation so as to give an overview of the whole solution. “We are confident that we have made a solution that
is both efficient and effective,” says
Chehade. “We have had positive feedback from all the companies we have tested with, so now it
is just a case of getting these
plugin modules out into the wider market.”
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Project Partners: Princeps (France); Manopt Systems (Ireland); Technology Transfer System (Italy); SchuF Valve Technology (Ireland)
MAIN CONTACT
Hamid Chehade Hamid Chehade, graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, and was awarded the DEA in Artificial Intelligence from Paris VI University. He is the founder of Princeps has managed Refinery Planning and Scheduling projects worldwide and built optimisation solutions for Refinery scheduling and large network optimisation.
Contact: Tel: +33178140130 Email:
hamid.chehade@
princeps.com Web:
www.cap2msched.eu
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