A Mathematical Model and Heuristic Approach for the Production Planning in the Glass Container Industry

Resumen

This work presents a mathematical model for production planning problem in the glass containers industry. The manufacturing process in this type of industrial plant has two phases. In the first phase, the glass melting in a furnace is performed and in the second stage the production of containers occurs in molding machines. The appropriate configurations for each machine connected in a furnace is a decision to be taken, which depends on the demand forecast for glass container within a time horizon. The model proposed will describe objectives and constraints that allow defining the best configuration for the whole plant. A heuristic combining Fix-and-Optimize and Relax-and-Fix approaches is also applied over the same instances. The results indicate that the proposed model as well as the heuristics are able to provide good quality solutions for this problem.