Planning, scheduling and control systems: why cannot they work together

Abstract

The decisions made by the planning, scheduling, and control functions have a large economic impact on process industry operations—estimated to be as high as 10 dollars increased margin per ton of feed for many plants. The current process industry environment places even more of a premium on effective execution of these functions. In spite of the incentives, or maybe because of them, there exists significant disagreement about the proper organization and integration of these functions, indeed even which decisions are properly considered by the planning, scheduling or control business process. Advances in data capture and conditioning, sophisticated analytical techniques, and high performance computing environments have provided improved support for all three functions. High-speed communications can transfer information and data almost without limits. Yet, maintaining consistency among the decisions in most process companies continues to be difficult and the lack of consistency has real economic consequences. In this paper, we examine the following questions: what are the key issues, similarities, and differences for these functions in support of process industry decision making? What are the roadblocks in achieving the integration that seems technically feasible? The answers have significant financial implications as well as implications with regard to technology selection, infrastructure design, and staffing requirements.