Luís Guimarães’s thesis, titled Advanced Production Planning in the Beverage Industry, was supervised by Bernardo Almada-Lobo (Member of the Board of INESC TEC) and Diego Klabjan (Northwestern University, USA), addresses production batch scheduling and dimension in the beverage industry. Knowing that production planning plays a fundamental role in the performance of the supply chain, and motivated by the complexity of production planning in this particular industry, the researcher studied and developed quantitative tools that help managers in decision-making processes, using new mathematical programming models and metaheuristics that have led to the advancement of this area. This dissertation was developed as part of the Doctoral Program in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

The winning paper of the IO2015, titled “Pricing, relaxing and fixing under lot sizing and scheduling, European Journal of Operational Research”, written by Luís Guimarães, Bernardo Almada-Lobo and Diego Klabjan, introduces important advancements to the area of production scheduling and dimension with sequence-dependent setup times. The paper starts by introducing a new formulation based on production sequences in which the same product can have different production batches. Based on this formulation, the researchers propose a new solution that combines metaheuristics with mathematical programming. The computational results show that the new method is better than those described in the literature, and is capable of solving real instances.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partners institutions: UP-FEUP and INESC TEC.

INESC TEC, September 2015