An Integer Programming Model to Maximize Battery Manufacturing Productivity

An Integer Programming (IP) model is formulated and optimally solved for a real-life production planning problem. The model is used to determine the optimum production plan for the formation stage of battery manufacturing in a local battery-producing company. Battery manufacturing is a complicated process that involves several stages and several chemical and physical operations. The formation stage is considered the bottleneck of this process because it has the most critical limitations of time and production resources. In the formation stage, batteries are filled with acid and charged with electricity using different types of circuits. The objective of the model is to maximize the productivity of the critical formation stage by allowing the best utilization of the limited time and equipment resources. The model is able to consider a large number of battery sizes and types and also a large number of charging circuits with different capacities and charging speeds. The model-generated optimum production plans increase daily profits by 12% on average in comparison to manually-generated production plans.