2
THESIS SUBJECT: CAMPAIGN PLANNING IN THE (SPECIALTY) CHEMICAL
INDUSTRY
Domain: Planning act
Initiators: Kris Dockx, Jo Vernelen
Thesis in collaboration with OM Partners NV.
Keywords: campaign, specialty chemical,
2.1
Background
Switching production from one chemical product family to another chemical product family
is costly because of production time loss, unwanted production of intermediate offspec
product, or personnel or other cost in executing the change-over.
This change-over loss (capacity loss as well as cost) is sequence-dependent and the
standard deviation is wide.
Therefore, when doing the bucketized volume planning, it is NOT sufficient to account for
the change-over loss by an average figure.
In fact, the volume decision cannot be separated from the sequencing decision. In other
words the chemical industry needs to be able to solve a mixed planning and scheduling
problem also known as campaign planning.
Campaign planning has a typical planning horizon of 6-12 months with weekly or monthly
buckets. Alternative machine choices are common. In some cases a continuous operation of
the machines is required. In which case stopping and restarting of the machine is heavily
penalized and should therefore be avoided.
OM partners’ OMPPlus application uses an underlying continuous time representation, but
also allows any granularity of time bucketing overlay and aggregate resource
representation. This makes OMPPlus ideally suited for representing such a challenging mix
of planning and scheduling.
Global Optimization of campaign planning is out of reach for a pure mathematical
programming approach. A near-optimal hybrid approach seems to be most adviseable
2.2
Assignment
The goal of this thesis is to investigate the hybrid use of different optimization techniques
that address the above described campaign planning problem.
Because of the complexity, the industry is actually addressing a simplified version of the
campaigning problem:
 The required volume is first calculated at infinite machine capacity
 A predefined “ideal” sequence of production aka a production wheel is used with a
(e.g. monthly) recurring pattern
 Campaigns are then predefined reflecting/estimating the volume needed per month
per campaign
 These predefined campaigns are sequenced according to the production wheel
 Finite capacity constraints and demand are fulfilled by filling these predefined
campaigns with smaller production orders and by manually stretching or shrinking
campaigns
Automatically solving the above simplified campaigning problem is already a challenge
worth while investigating. But the ultimate aim of the thesis is to address the general
campaigning problem in the (specialty) chemical industry.
We envision the following phases in this thesis:
1. Literature study:
a. Has something similar been done before
b. The following article might be an interesting starting point for a literature
survey: “Simultaneous lotsizing and scheduling by combining local search
with dual reoptimization”, H.Meyr
2. Choose one or more suitable approaches and compare them to the current
approach, using small theoretical datasets.
3. Proof of concept: implement/visualize promising approaches and test them on a
realistic dataset from industry. What improvements can be achieved?
2.3
Information on OM Partners
OM Partners is a leading software vendor of supply chain planning solutions. OM Partners is
located in Antwerp (Belgium). Its main software product is called OMP Plus and offers the
following main functionalities:
- planning (spread sheet visualization)
- scheduling (Gantt Chart visualization)
- designing (investment decisions)
- optimizing (mathematical optimization module).