Optimal Scheduling of Liquid Drug Product Manufacturing

Abstract

Production scheduling in pharmaceutical production must consider a complex set of features, including due dates, shelf-life, reduced possibility for task execution during night shifts or weekends. Especially when dealing with the sterile production of liquid drug products, production is prone to short-term rescheduling; mainly caused by material scarcity, process duration uncertainty and holding time restrictions. The mentioned complexity and rescheduling challenges motivate the development of production models that are accounting for these features and include efficient campaigning by minimizing the duration of sequence dependant activities. A slot-based model was developed to solve these problems with the objective of minimizing the overall makespan. The model was applied to a filling line of liquid drug products in an industrial case study, which allowed the validation of the presented model and revealed a 2 % optimisation potential on a ten batch planning goal. The successful implementation for one filling line has motivated the expansion of the model to two parallel and three consecutive processing units.