Track: Operations Management

Abstract

The present paper discusses the problem of short-term supply chain planning for production and logistics operations in the chemical industry.

Our contribution is threefold. First, we designed a model of a real-world production site, translating the constraints and realities of the field into a mathematical model that is simple enough to be tractable but sufficiently rich to support decision-making. Secondly, we formulated and solved this problem as a MILP using the CPLEX solver.

Finally, we applied this model to the OCP Safi plant, a chemical industry site of OCP Group. Using the model, we performed a sensitivity analysis on a real-life data instance, in order to detect the bottlenecks and determine the production boundaries.

The results revealed that increasing the capacity of some specific production units, but not all, is required to increase the volume that can be produced and delivered. Identifying these bottlenecks will help OCP Group make informed decisions on how to distribute the investment effort, in order to increase the performance of the whole supply chain.