Meta-Heuristics for Large-Scale Process Scheduling

With the high complexity and numerous constraints in
process industry, process scheduling is more
difficult than discrete machine scheduling,
especially, large-scale process scheduling is still
quite challenging to researchers and practitioners.
The researchers often use mathematical models to
solve small-size problems to optimality. However,
for the practical large-scale problems, it is still
hard to obtain acceptable solutions within
reasonable time by using such exact models in
current computing environments. Hence scheduling by
simple heuristic rules is still prevalent in real
industry. Despite the extensive use of meta-
heuristics in machine scheduling, little literature
exists on meta-heuristics for process scheduling.
This book has studied and developed meta-heuristic
methods for large-scale process scheduling. The
major contribution of this book is the effective and
intelligent use of heuristics to guide the solution
methods to search in the feasible or promising
space, thus quickly finding high-quality solutions.
The target readers are the professionals and
students with interest to scheduling and
combinatorial optimization.

Autorentext
Dr. HE is presently a research follow in the Logistics Institute - Asia Pacific at NUS working on logistics/supply chain modeling and solution, and once was a senior computer engineer/COO in IT companies. Dr. HUI is an associate professor in HKUST, a specialist in process design and integration, and once was a senior consultant in Mitsubishi.

Klappentext
With the high complexity and numerous constraints in process industry, process scheduling is more difficult than discrete machine scheduling, especially, large-scale process scheduling is still quite challenging to researchers and practitioners. The researchers often use mathematical models to solve small-size problems to optimality. However, for the practical large-scale problems, it is still hard to obtain acceptable solutions within reasonable time by using such exact models in current computing environments. Hence scheduling by simple heuristic rules is still prevalent in real industry. Despite the extensive use of meta- heuristics in machine scheduling, little literature exists on meta-heuristics for process scheduling. This book has studied and developed meta-heuristic methods for large-scale process scheduling. The major contribution of this book is the effective and intelligent use of heuristics to guide the solution methods to search in the feasible or promising space, thus quickly finding high-quality solutions. The target readers are the professionals and students with interest to scheduling and combinatorial optimization.