Abstract
The determination of completion time constitutes an important step in developing algorithms for short-term production scheduling. Existing completion time algorithms of multi-product batch processes often assume that intermediate storage tanks are always available when it is needed. In this paper, we consider a serial multi-product batch plants with ZW and NIS policy intermediate storge tank. We limit storage residence time and allocated products in the intermediate storage tank to minimize the quality change of the stored material as well as to reduce the clearing time during product change. A set of recurrence relations is suggested to calculate the completion times for the given batch sequence of products on all processing units. Also analytic solution for the suggested model is solved by a graphical method. The effectiveness of these results is proved by a few illustrative examples.