Enabling mechanical recycle and electrification by optimizing inbound silo planning – SABIC

 Overview

Company Description

SABIC is a global leader in diversified chemicals headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It manufactures on a global scale in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, making distinctly different kinds of products: chemicals, commodity and high performance plastics, agri-nutrients and metals.

SABIC in Genk is a compounding plant, making high performance, customer specific PP compounds.  

Project Description

SABIC Genk uses a wide range of raw materials in its end products. All raw materials used in bigger quantities arrive on site in bulk truck and are stored in our inbound silos until they are used. At the moment, there are already more raw materials as there are silos, so flexible silos are used. They are emptied after a production run, so they can be filled with a different raw material.

Due to the higher market demand for mechanical recycled material in our products, we get multiple new raw materials. Add to that the effort SABIC makes with automotive OEMs to enable electrification and create lightweight solutions for cars, which both also introduces new raw materials.

The combination of these changes make the planning of the inbound a challenge. Currently this planning is manual in an Excel sheet, which we want to optimize.

Goals of the Project

Get insights in the bottlenecks of inbound silos though the introduction of new materials / changes in volume demand.

Optimization of the inbound silo planning by which production becomes more flexible

Deliverables

A model to optimize the planning of the silos

Essential Student Knowledge

Modeling planning problems, Optimization

More information: escf@tue.nl