W~6:~: ii'Al::':0;_1: r _ I . !<' '''.'~ '' *~:: ' :::: ',:: -i':: -, .. i-i:ff: : fffff ff: c:; t0 : :-' '' ,,: -: 'k -. , ,- 'n tj ,- '( ·:.··· --. 0 . ... :: :: : - ~ , :,:0A-.) .--- ·- i·. · ;-.··': 1 r· ·· ;-·:;·-: 'L' · - :-·· ·;·:^ r.· :, I' i-; ·· , :·· · . f (·_ r; -.; - :::- :: - ·- - ;..T.··::' i 1.1 - ::-:: :;I · ·_ i L,i - -: :·; : ·:. : ; .1. ·L:· ·- ·· e pa ; =G0S,;d,0~~ ttflfL-f~00t ~~~ yr ;' ·-· g': tr:: Q00000 -:-~:: f f pS ;S;:,E:SiV : -: : · ::'·· ;; · ·'·.-: '· ·- I· 1.·-. ·. S. N~~-:t~~B~4 0T ~I'' -.· ·· I: - .. -:·-· OF TEHNOOGY.T ··· ..: -.-I . Production Allocation Remodeling System: Optimizing for Competitive Advantage in a Mature Manufacturing Industry by D. Bonaquist*, R. Brown**, T. Hanson*, J. Shapiro***, V. Singhal** OR 155-87 * ** *** January 1987 Linde, Union Carbide, Tonawanda, NY Resource Management Systems, Cambridge, MA Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA page 1 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 I. INTRODUCTION production Setting manufacturing sites manufacturing companies. conceals is location of extreme, between large and manufacturing set also may as for for a cost of level lower scheduling production and targets largely determine for manufacturing call the as service levels. stage More generally, of utilization targets the such decisions, affects as well to customers, inventory management. the level in a routine decision, yet it clearly production targets manufacturing problem decision is This dispersed geographically have a direct effect on corporate performance. distributing products Production common a tradeoffs important distribution that The for targets site sites. to be At the most shut down or mothballed. This paper describes work we have allocation modeling system (PAMS) for the Union Carbide Corporation. done on a production Linde Division of the The system has been in use for more than a year in the company's Eastern region, and installations in other regions are underway. PAMS to a national Work is also in progress to elevate model encompassing all of Linde's important sites and customers. Linde is a major producer of industrial gases (oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen), with numerous manufacturing sites and customers throughout the United States. PAMS is to minimize combined The immediate purpose of regional manufacturing and page 2 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 distribution costs over a planning period of approximately thirty days. More generally, individual customer production sites. sites in corporate demands PAMS also keeping planners to use it to allocate geographically optimally allocates dispersed idle time to with complex relationships between production costs and capabilities. Beyond the immediate general interest application, because it we believe PAMS the demonstrates is of value of optimization in a mature industry where conventional wisdom might lead one limited. can be to expect opportunities for cost reduction to be In particular, it demonstrates how an integrating model used to bring the production and engineering company's to bear on technical the expertise in strategic goal of lowering costs to enhance competitive position. The PAMS project also illustrates how a application evolve together over the course of a an interplay between considerations. model and an project through practical, computational, and theoretical In this case the model became both more correct and simpler -- a happy but perhaps fortuitous outcome which is by no means the rule with complex modeling applications. The model development in PAMS is novel in that mixed integer programming (MIP) constructs for describing electricity contracts (see Bender et al (1981), Bender et al (1985) for of construct other examples analysis) are combined with manufacturing submodels and a distribution network. Moreover, the implementation PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 successfully linked a chemical page 3 process optimization model to a mathematical programming model for tactical planning. II. INDUSTRY BACKGROUND Production of quintessential industrial mature gases is manufacturing in many industry. ways the The process of cryogenic distillation by which air is separated into gaseous and liquid elemental fractions has been known for over eighty years. Competing producers now similar intrinsic operate capital thermodynamic intensive efficiencies; plants with few radical breakthroughs in production technology are to be expected. the sole raw material, quality. Nor is there much except for special Air, is free and does not vary appreciably in scope for product differentiation-- applications where extreme purity is essential, all liquid oxygen is very much the same. Despite this uniformity on the supply side, however, the markets for industrial gases are changing, largely in response to structural changes in the national and world economy. Demand for liquid and gaseous oxygen was for many years the driving force of the industry. demand has In recent been declining, such as steelmaking shift for liquid years nitrogen is the low temperature offshore. increasing for and of increase in this as the centers of basic industries enhanced oil recovery, and other very rate areas chemical On the other hand, demand use in food preparation, where a inertness combination of is essential. PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 (Figure 1 shows this shift in page 4 demand over the last two decades for the industry as a whole.) These changes have also led to demand, away from the near the proportion of industry's by gas customer's in the location of older midwestern industrial centers. years, the bulk of the large customers a shift production pipeline, from facility. was For delivered to production sites located Now, a large and increasing demand is for liquid products, which are delivered in insulated trucks or railcars to a larger number of more geographically dispersed customers. The result has been to alter accepted premises and operating procedures. stable larger were. The company is no industries, and longer principally an adjunct of cannot afford to operate as if it This shift in the conditions underlying competition in the industry stability. raises It hazards also where opens up for decades new opportunities there companies that can been adapt to the new conditions. had for been those In U1 r I u I \t I lI II-L I I I i rI i ZI zi W' 01 I I I OT in rN / ! W OI I I I I O. Z 9I 0; 0 N r9 I I I I I i i i . ... 0 _- . . I I t ** rr .r r r r-, 1y G 5 6k 19 5 5 D oIn M-jJ-oz --- \ - rr 9 s I lr-- T T IU i i eg G N m UDM-U ----- I r UWWH -- L-- I I e page 5 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 III. PROJECT BACKGROUND The PAMS of Linde's project originated in a general desire on the part upper to management bolster competitive position through better operation of the Linde production and distribution system. Delivered cost competitive advantage service.) control over costs are have of the primary determinants of in this industry (the other being customer The two primary elements of cost production. cost. is one the short and The latter still quite subject to term are distribution and medium are generally larger, but distribution significant -- typically 30% of delivered It was therefore focused that are that natural at -first on independently of the other, Linde's reducing particularly attention should each of since these such costs an effort meshed with the current division of functional responsibilities. For the purposes Linde groups its large regions customers and -- East, South, any site can serve demanded by of production and distribution planning, demands planning cycle. are provided it Within assigned These sites Central, and so on. any customer, the customer. customer production demands to into several In principle, makes the product a region, known or predicted a site through a monthly can then be aggregated into production targets for each product at each site. In practice, planners in the distribution function assigned customers to sites, since it was they who managed the shipment of PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 product to customers. made heavy use of developed to an In making elaborate page 6 this decision, these planners network minimize distribution model costs. which had been This tended to favor assignment of customers to the nearest site, without taking fully into account the cost of production at the site. process its and represented well economics were rates too complex to be in such a model, and found no other exponent in production allocation process. production simply The production through Instead, an region informal attempted to reconcile forecasted management set heuristic process which product demand, relative site production costs, inventory levels, and distribution costs. Linde also had in place a improve the localized efficiency element of this program was quite successful program to of production a set (including should minimizing Although be the it random The search) to instantaneous performance of individual sites. SOM had been developed for use at each site to site the authors. of data gathering procedures and software based on nonlinear optimization techniques optimize the A major the Site Optimization Map (SOM), which was developed and implemented by two of SOM is sites. has operated rate been of to determine how the meet given production rates while energy and The consumption still localized optimization, it could is not very in (power demand). successful at this itself determine what those rates should be. As we reviewed Linde's procedures and tools it became clear that cost reductions in production and distribution would be at PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 best haphazard, concert. if not page 7 illusory, unless they were achieved in Conspicuous by its absence was the ability to plan both production and distribution comprehensive framework to activities achieve the within greatest a single, overall cost reductions. This kind of coordinated planning looked to be a relatively untapped area in which company from it would be possible to distinguish the its competitors, which generally have smaller, less complex production and distribution systems than Linde. In a competitive industry such as Linde's, cost reductions of even one or two percent can be extremely important. IV. MODEL DEFINITION Air separation fractions. sites produce gaseous and air Gases (oxygen, nitrogen) are distributed by pipeline to customers located near the site. Liquids (oxygen, nitrogen, argon) are distributed by truck or railroad tanker. joint deliveries; in fact, each vehicle is dedicated product. liquid There are no to a single This means that the distribution system -- and costs-- for each product are linked only through joint production at the sites. The distribution simple network of arcs component of PAMS is thus represented as a linking production (or external supply) points to customers. customer. Unit transportation cost between a site and a customer reflects the distance In general, between any site can deliver to any the two points, and perhaps the page 8 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 30 December 1986 intervening geography. historical data and costs used in PAMS are derived from The were already in use for distribution planning. Most of the structure of the representation of the production sites. representation them joint from stems production, model lies in the of this The complexity variety of related factors, among a electricity contracts, and shut-down operation. A. Joint Production A site process -- up to produced at jointly from produces products five any rate, products at the same production once. A product can be within upper and lower limits that depend upon the site, the product, and the rates at which other products are being produced. P1 P2 Figure 2 The (instantaneous) increasing function strong cross power of production demand (KW) rates for of the site is an all products, with terms, particularly for liquid products. There are page 9 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 strong theoretical and surface is convex. empirical In fact, definitive quadratic reasons to believe that the multiple regression form gives a good fit. to a positive No closed form for the function KW=f(P1,...Pn) is known. KW production rate, product P2 - Figure 3 For modeling purposes, all our knowledge about the KW surface for a site is obtained from the SOM, which was originally developed to help site most efficiently. production managers Given operate their sites desired production rates for a set of products, the SOM will determine the minimum power demand for the site to produce at methods to find this chemical engineering, those minimum. where rates. This Wang (1978)). is standard practice in the complexity and nonlinearity of the underlying production processes difficult to The SOM uses random search makes gradient methods very implement and cumbersome to use (see Martin (1982), Random search methods also make it configure the SOM to the characteristics of each site. easier to page 10 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 B. Electricity Contracts Virtually the only variable cost is the cost of electricity used to run compressors and liquefiers, is very so that production cost closely tied to the site's power demand. assign a therefore customer for, implicitly say, alters L02 (liquid the nitrogen) at that site, and hence A decision to oxygen) to site A cost of producing LN2 (liquid the economics of assigning an LN2 customer to site A. But production cost at thermodynamic efficiency. that are often a site It quite is not strictly a matter of is governed complex and by contractual terms that differ, sometimes radically, from site to site. One typical contractual feature is that the site is charged both for energy (KWH) consumption and for maximum (instantaneous) power draw (KW) during called "billing some contract demand". billing period These costs are roughly -- the soof the same magnitude, though energy costs tend to be higher. Under most discontinuously by contracts time of day. which the day is divided hours. Energy the into charges are unit cost of energy Figure 4 depicts a situation in on-peak, mid-peak, The relative and off-peak highest during the on-peak hours, lowest during off-peak, and take on an intermediate mid-peak. varies proportion of value during on, off, and mid peak periods in a different. Any period type may be absent from any day type. weekday, weekend day, and holiday may all be PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 page 11 $ /KWH 0 ---- hour in day ----- 24 Figure 4 Time of Day Energy Pricing The charge on billing demand ($/KW) may also be different in on, off, and mid-peak energy charges. periods, Often although not in proportion to billing demand charges are only incurred during certain periods. Under such contractual terms, there is a strong incentive to produce at higher rates during off-peak periods, when energy and power are cheaper, and to throttle back during more expensive (i.e. on-peak) periods. C. Shut-down Operation Linde has excess production Gaseous products cannot be for liquids is limited. capacity inventoried, and in some regions. inventory capacity Therefore, it is often necessary to put a site into standby mode for some part of the month. If left to itself, an LP model would choose to down during expensive. on-peak hours, when energy shut a plant and power are both most In practice, such a solution would be impractical for page 12 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 operational reasons. While the purpose of PAMS was not to schedule site production day by day or hour by hour, it was vital that the solutions be operationally feasible. It was therefore necessary to impose a kind of loose parity between the length of time the site would be shut down during on, off, and mid-peak. D. Slates: Discretizing the Decision Space Both energy both are and power costs can be very significant. directly related important to represent One approach might have to power demand (KW) Since it was clearly these relationships with fair accuracy. been to use quadratic programming to describe energy costs, but this was rejected for several reasons. First, there are no commercial grade QP codes capable of handling MIP constructs. Also, we had at best only an empirically derived quadratic KW function, based on regression. Instead, we chose number of to discretize production slates. production rate for each associated with A the The basic decision of the model, space into a large slate is a vector containing a product, and operating the the minimum power demand site to produce at those rates. therefore, is to determine how long to operate each potential slate. This itself would have presented little problem, since LP is quite able cost of to represent power (so a convex called demand cost function. However, the charge) is based on billing demand, that is, the maximum instantaneous power demand entire period. over the Thus, this cost would be incurred only by the set PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 of production rates used during the period that resulted in the greatest power demand, regardless operated. page 13 of how long that slate was page 14 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft 1(rwb), 21 January 1987 V. MODEL FORMULATION We present here the original MIP formulation upon which PAMS based. was formulation, both planning simplifications. of this section. MIP models drawn from this prior to and after their application to actual led problems, approach for with Experience a to the modifications and discussed briefly at the conclusion These are In of number following implementing the section, we discuss our system based on these models, and experience with the system. Indices i: 1 to I index for plants j: 0 to J index for slates at each plant (slate 0 is plant shut-down) k: 1 to K index for products m: 1 to M index for customers Parameters Pij = power draw for jth slate at plant i e i = electric energy charge at plant i (KW) ($ per KWH) E i = electric power demand charge at plant i ($ per KW) Cik m = cost of transporting one unit of product k from plant i to customer m ($ per cubic foot) aijk = instantaneous production rate of product k by jth slate at plant i (cubic feet per hour) dkm = demand for product k by customer m (cubic feet) R = minimum run time for any slate at any plant T = length of planning horizon (hours) (hours) PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 page 15 Variables tij = length of time plant i uses jth slate W i = maximal power demand at plant i (hours) (KW) 1 if jth slate at plant i is used at a positive level xij 0 otherwise Yikm = quantity of product k shipped from plant i to customer m (cubic feet) Production Allocation Model (PAM) I J I minimize z eiPijtij i=S + EiW K + i j=u (1) ikmikm i=b k=l Subject to: For i = 1,...,I J j=1 M - aijktij > Yikm 0 for k = 1 ,..., K (2) m=l J r tij = T (3) j=0 tij - Rxij > 0 tij - < 0 Txij Wi (4a) for j = 1,..., J Ž Pijxij (4b) (4c) For m= 1,...,M I Yikm tij 0, W i > 0, = dm for k = 1,..., K Xij = 0 or 1, Yikm 0 (5) ( (6) page 16 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 The objective function (1) in this energy costs, energy power demand costs, Note that energy and power for use at each with that with furthermore, each operating characteristics. and distribution costs. costs differ from plant to plant. This is because the contracts location, and model is the sum of Note electric utilities vary by plant has its unique design and also that the slates available plant, and their costs, are uniquely associated plant. We have chosen the fixed number J of trial slates for each plant simply for expositional convenience. The constraints (2) state that the total quantity shipped from each plant cannot exceed the total production. the inequality was extended to account for small quantities of beginning and allowable ending inventories. state that In practice, The constraints (3) the entire planning horizon is consumed at each plant by production time and down time plant shut-down slate). (recall that slate 0 is the The constraints (4a) and (4b) state that the time tij that the jth slate is used at plant i, if it is used at all, must lie between maximal allowable time T. is redundant the conditional The upper bounding minimum R and the constraint in (4b) in the light of constraint (3); we have included it for expositional purposes. Constraint (4c) ensures that the power demand W i upon which the power charge is based equals the maximum of the power demand draws among slates selected by the plant i. The constraints shipments from the plants. (5) state We that demand note that model for must be met by most customers demand PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 only one product. page 17 Thus, the total number of constraints (6) is far fewer than KM. The specific models generated by PAMS turned out complex than (PAM) for extended distinguish to operations when several reasons. among peak, First, mid-peak to be more the model was and off-peak the electricity rates vary significantly. Plant shut-downs were modeled more extensively to ensure that shut-down periods occur contiguously. Moreover, contracts with the electric utility may be more complicated, involving, for example, terms relating off-peak to differences periods. These in power draws between peak and complications were modeled by straightforward extensions of the modeling techniques used above. Finally, for complex manufacturing sites involving several interconnected plants, the models were extended so that they would choose the plant configurations as well as the slates for each plant. Even without these extensions, model of the fixed charge demand charges variety. In a large scale MIP particular, the power associated with the W i behave in a manner similar to fixed charges. Tricks involving objective functions relatively (PAM) is derived from effective solutions quickly. in A causing cutting planes an optimal the charges Ei relative to the energy charges branch and bound to work more efficiently. the MIP optimization with the best LP solution proved models uniform reduction on the plant to in size ei produce good of the demand also caused the A second pass through solution from this heuristic page 18 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 as incumbent required far less CPU time than that required from a cold start without an incumbent. Feedback from users at the simplification that allowed the optimized. For purposes running the the plant prefer plants to an important models to be still more rapidly of monthly to employ period (peak, mid-peak, off-peak). optimal solution led planning, the people one slate for each contract The slate suggested from an to (PAM) for each contract period is the convex combination of the slates where the weights are the time that a slate is used. slate function for the the fractions of Since the surface of the cost vs. plants studied thus far has empirically proven to be convex, we have been able to relax the corresponding MIP constructs in optimizing the model. However, MIP constructs are still required to properly model shut-downs. VI. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS PAMS was implemented for an IBM mainframe computer using the LOGS model generation language (see Brown et al (1986)) and the IBM optimization package MIP/370. It is important to emphasize that the LOGS model generation in PAMS produces a family of models. a model for a specific region depends on the data passed to whether a certain contractural it. The precise consisting of several plants For example, element is formulation of depending upon present in the data, certain structures may or may not be present in the model. We reiterate that the model (PAM) discussed in the previous section _____1_____lIillllli_l____I__ PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 was merely the point of departure page 19 for our implementation work, and the creation of a generator for a family of models. The MIP models generated thus have tended to be quite large. far the PAMS the Eastern Region As many as 1000 slates for each of three plants were generated by included in for models. the Site Optimization Map and Moreover, the models incorporate upward of 1000 customers demands over a typical monthly planning horizon. Automatic procedures implemented, but have resulting models columns. above, not have a Using the the customer yet aggregation been extensively The few thousand rows and as many as 10,000 simplifications and models used. were are usually first approximation, within a few approximations outlined optimized, at least to a close CPU minutes on an IBM 3083 computer. We believe that the lead to shifts patterns. in the PAMS in the Eastern Region has prevailing However, applications, it use of as is is difficult production often the and distribution case to substantiate in real-world this belief with experimental results, for the simple and obvious reason that PAMS is not run in fluctuate from an experimental context. Customer demands month to month, and there is no "control" process to show what would have been done in the absence of a model. A "base case" was run early in the project, in which PAMS was used to second guess a The model solutions with a decrease in recent month's showed allocation decisions. an increase in distribution costs, production costs that more than compensates PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 for this increase. Overall, the estimate is that PAMS produces monthly production/distribution lower in page 20 strategies that are 1% to 2% total cost than solutions that would have been obtained without it. VII. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH PAMS has proven itself to be a useful and important planning tool at Linde. Its success demonstrates once again that computer technology has at last reached a level of development permitting mathematical programming models to be implemented and effectively applied to business project skills was and programming, also planning due to a experience in chemical and computer Finally, the support of radically new problems. success of this felicitous blending of scientific engineering, systems Linde's top approach to The design mathematical and programming. management in supporting a planning was crucial to the project's success. PAMS is currently being national regions. In this Optimization is Map several production extended for use in other Linde regard, experimentation with the Site required for plants that Two of the authors (Hansen and those sites consisting of can be linked in different ways. Bonaquist (1986)) have developed an MIP model for calculating slates for these more complex sites. A related area of future Optimization Map more experimentation directly directed decomposition methods to (see the is to link the Site PAMS models via price Shapiro (1979)). -1--1-- ------ ·_ The idea _·_ _I_ __II__ I_ ^ L-i II1 PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 would be page 21 to occasionally use shadow prices from the mathematical programming model to price out slates produced by the SOM, and select new slates for the PAMS model. Once models for all Linde's regions have been developed, the intention is to construct strategic planning addressed by such a longer purposes. a model range, The national types include of contract model for problems to be negotiations with customers and electric utilities, long term plant shut-downs, and economic evaluations of new markets. Moving in the scope, a new other project direction is with underway to respect to time and convert the production planning sub-model in PAMS to a production scheduling model. reader may have noted that the combination of slates, but model (PAM) makes no sequence in which they should be used. selects an optimal attempt to schedule the In the short-term when we consider distinct production periods with varying plant, and The demands on the recognize that inventory storage for gas is extremely limited, the slates can sequencing be viewed of slates as fine becomes important. These tuned adjustments of the tactical planning slates selected by PAMS. Finally, generalizations of the should be applicable to models developed other process manufacturing industries. The underlying principle in performing modeling area is to better for PAMS understand optimization models, which provide how to imbed research in this process control an instantaneous prescription for the plant, in one or more mathematical programming models for PAMS O.R. PAPER, draft l(rwb), 21 January 1987 page 22 production planning and scheduling. We believe the models in PAMS are an important step in this research direction. VIII. REFERENCES P. S. Bender, R. W. "Improving Brown, Purchasing M. H. Isaac, Productivity at and IBM J. with F. Shapiro, a Normative Decision Support System," Interfaces, 15, May-June, 1985, pp 106115. P. S. Bender, W. D. Northup and Modeling for Resource Management," March-April 1981, J. Harvard F. Shapiro, "Practical Business Review, 59, pp 163-173. Bonaquist and Hansen (1986) SOM in preparation R. W. Brown, W. D. Northup and Optimization System for Computer Assisted Decision and J. F. Shapiro "LOGS: A Modeling Business Making, Planning," pp 227-241 in edited by G. Mitra, North- H9lland, 1986. D. L. Martin and Adaptive Randomly J. L. Gaddy, "Progress Directed Search," Optimization with the AIChE Symposium Series, 78, 1982, pp 79-107. J. F. Shapiro, Mathematical Programming: Structures and Algorithms, John Wiley and Sons, 1979. B. Wang and R. Luus, "Reliability of Optimization Procedures for Obtaining Global Optimum," AIChE Journal, 24, 1978, pp 619-626.