Drying operation planning in a sawmill

Abstract

The success of lumber manufacturing lies on the ability to maintain the quality of the wood along the production process. The drying stage in a sawmill is one of the more important steps in the lumber production, since wood value and characteristics required by customers depend on this process phase. In a sawmill, a set of drying kilns operating in parallel out of phase is available, and periodically, packages of boards enter to this drying sector in order to be processed. Drying kilns are filled with wagons loaded with packages of boards. Different operative conditions must be satisfied in order to assure an efficient processing. These tasks involve several decisions, which are addressed through a Generalized Disjunctive Programming model, and solved using the corresponding Mixed Integer Programming reformulation considering different objective functions. From the examples, two scenarios are assessed and the capabilities of the presented approach are highlighted.