This project brings together two European partners (the University of the West of England and the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University) and three Brazilian partners (the University of São Paulo, Federal University of São Carlos, and São Paulo State University).

The five universities are carrying out a large three-year joint research programme on a major competitive issue for both the EU and Brazil, with a strong economical and environmental impact, namely, the optimization of production planning processes across several industries. The project exchanges research staff between the EU and Brazil with the aim of developing and testing industrial extensions to models and optimisation algorithms in production lot sizing, cutting and packing and scheduling in 6 industries: animal nutrition, beverages, glass, dairy products, textiles and furniture.

The objective is to help industrial companies fully optimize short-to-medium term productivity in the most cost-effective manner by solving production planning and scheduling problems using an integrated and optimal approach. Many companies have been using mathematical programming models that are unrealistic and oblige managers to review and modify manually the plans suggested by planning systems in order to obtain feasible plans. Standard models need to be refined and extended to effectively reflect reality. For this purpose, industrially-driven modelling extensions to these problems will be tackled for lot sizing and scheduling problems, as well as for cutting and packing problems. The aim is also to develop and implement state-of-the-art efficient solution procedures.

The specific objectives of this project consist of:

1. Formulating industrial extensions to production planning models that can handle the complexities of specific industries;
2. Developing methods to solve the models formulated;
3. Testing the models and solutions methods in the six selected industry areas in both the EU and Brazil;
4. Disseminating the results within EU and Brazilian academia, and promote the transfer of knowledge from academia to industries;
5. Transfering knowledge between the EU and Brazil.

Dates start/end: May 2010 / April 2013;

Funding Entinty: European Comission ( 7.º Programa-Quadro de IDT)

• May, 2010
• April, 2013

Partners:

• University of the West of England
• Faculty of Engineering of Porto University
• University of São Paulo, Federal University of São Carlos
• São Paulo State University

PPEXT official website

FP7-PEOPLE MARIE CURIE ACTIONS
International Research Staff Exchange Scheme Call: FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IRSES PART B