Bakery production scheduling optimization - A PSO approach

Production of bakery goods is strictly time sensitive due to the yeast proofing of doughs. That causes special requirements for production planning and scheduling, which is in bakeries often completely based on the practical experience of the responsible employee instead of mathematical methods. This often leads to suboptimal performance of companies due to the sometimes "chaotic" scheduling approach. This work presents an approach to use PSO as a highly efficient numerical method to solve complex scheduling problems. In all probability bakeries will be able to increase efficiency by optimizing their production planning with numerical methods like the one presented here. After modelling the production line with a limited range of input data and a pre-processing of the necessary data to match the real process induced requirements, a PSO algorithm handles the optimization task. Results show the high potential of this method to solve the scheduling problem in good computational time.