Abstract
The purpose of this study is to find analytic solution of determining the optimal capacity (lot-size) of multiproduct acyclic multistage production and inventory system to meet the finished product demand under the constraint of finite intermediate storage. Intermediate storage is a practical way to mitigate the material flow imbalance through the line of supply and demand chain. However, the cost of constructing and operating storage facilities is becoming substantial because of increasing land value, environmental and safety concern. Therefore, reasonable decision-making about the capacity of processes and storage units is an important subject for industries. The industrial solution for this subject is to use the classical economic lot sizing method, EOQ/EPQ(Economic Order Quantity/Economic Production Quantity) model, incorporated with practical experience. But EOQ/EPQ model is not suitable for the chemical plant design with highly interlinked processes and storage units because it is developed based on single product and single stage. This study overcomes the limitation of the classical lot sizing method. The superstructure of the plant consists of the network of serially and/or parallelly interlinked non-continuous processes and storage units. The processes transform a set of feedstock materials into another set of products with constant conversion factors. A novel production and inventory analysis method, PSW(Periodic Square Wave) model, is applied to describe the detail material flows among equipments. The objective function of this study is minimizing the total cost composed of setup and inventory holding cost. The advantage of PSW model comes from the fact that the model provides a set of simple analytic solutions in spite of realistic description of the material flows between processes and storage units. the resulting simple analytic solution can greatly enhance the proper and quick investment decision for the preliminary plant design problem confronted with economic situation.