Robust Scheduling of Waste Wood Processing Plants with Uncertain Delivery Sources and Quality

Abstract

While the study of reverse wood value chains has become an important topic recently, optimization-focused studies usually consider network-level problems and decisions, and do not address the individual processes in the network. In the case of waste wood, one such important process is the scheduling of the various machines in a waste wood processing facility to treat incoming wood deliveries with multiple sources and varying quality. This paper proposes a robust multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model for the optimization of this process that considers the uncertain origins and compositions of the incoming deliveries, while aiming to minimize both lateness and energy consumption. An exhaustive study is performed on instance sets of different sizes and structures to show the efficiency and the limits of the proposed model both in single- and multi-objective cases.