A MILP approach for detailed operational scheduling of a supply chain in the phosphate industry
Résumé
Short-term detailed multiproduct phosphate production, pipeline transportation, and storage management are complex problems with many industry-specific constraints. We are interested in solving an integrated production (washing stations) and multiproduct pipeline transportation scheduling problem in the context of (phosphate) mining industry. In this paper, an approach based on a mixed-nteger linear programming model with a continuous-time formulation is proposed. The objective is to determine a scheduling of the supply chain allowing to maximize the utilization rate of the pipeline, while respecting the constraints related to production, transport, storage capacity, and satisfaction of customers' demand requests. A group of short-term instances were generated using the real dataset of OCP’s supply chain and the obtained results show that the model is able to provide efficiently optimal solutions for these instances.