Corporate Production Planning for Industrial Gas Supply Chains under Low-Demand Conditions

When the market demand significantly changes as within the ongoing worldwide economical crisis, many plants are forced to operate far from their nominal conditions. In this case, the plantwide optimization of production sites is a myopic approach that could unavoidably lead to plant inefficiencies and unconventional operation issues without preventing anyhow economical losses. A way to tackle low-demand conditions is to raise the decision-making process from the plantwide level to the corporate level by assigning a Boolean variable to each production site to manage its on/off status. By doing so, certain additional (social) constraints may become relevant. This work proposes a novel approach to the corporate production planning entirely based on MS VISUAL C++ and on specific algorithms belonging to BzzMath library. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.