Plants

Plants are sites that produce material for use in the network. Before plants can be added to the Plants page you must ensure the following:

• A relevant case from an existing plant supply chain model must included in the supply chain network. You can add a plant while creating the model or add it later via the Model Info dialog box, available from the Supply Chain Models group of the Home ribbon tab in the Model Explorer.

• The location must be registered as a node of type Plant in the network.

  

Follow these steps to add a plant to the Plants page:

1. Do either of the following:

   • Click Add Plant in the Plants group of the Home ribbon tab.

   • Right-click anywhere in the table and choose Add Plant from the context menu.

     A new row is added to the table.

2. Make sure that the check box in the Active column is selected if you want the plant to be active within the optimization.

3. Enter a Name for the plant. Double click in the cell and type the new name.

4. Choose the Node corresponding to the plant. You can only choose among nodes of type Plant.

5. From the Model (Case) column choose the supply chain model and the case defining the capabilities of the plant.

6. Choose the Start and End periods of activity for the plant.

7. Choose whether to include Purchases and Sales from the plant case into the current case. Select the corresponding check box if you want to include purchases or sales.

   If you choose to do so, purchases from the plant case will be added to the Supplies page, and sales will be added to the Demands page.

8. Optionally, enter a Description for the plant.

If you have two or more plants referencing the same case, a wavy red line appears under each affected case in the Model (Case) column. Make sure you have no such duplication: each plant must refer to a different case.

Tip: You do not have to match cases to plants. If you want to share the same definition across all periods, leave the Period column empty. The single plant definition is then used at the plant node for all cases, but the solution in each period can be different.

Warning: If you have a hierarchy of Network cases in a model, make changes to the Model (Case) values in the Plants table only when you are in the master case of your hierarchy.
Making changes to the Model (Case) field in a subcase breaks the case inheritance for the plant models, leading to a potentially non-intuitive parent-case relationship between the plant cases.

Plant configurations and multi-period modeling

To use a different plant configuration in different periods, the Start and End periods must be reset to span the entire time horizon as entered on the Periods page. When the case spans several periods within the multi-period model, embedded cases are created to represent the configurations within each period.

When editing the plant you can see the per-period configurations within the embedded plant cases.

Plant inventories

Individual plant cases may have settings for inventory build-up or draw-down. These settings are honored when the case is used as part of a multi-period optimization. For example, if a case has a minimum final reformate inventory of 100 kbbl, this is used as a constraint during optimization. If the case is used as part of a multi-period optimization, this inventory may be used to stockpile material as appropriate.

Each plant-level inventory in a case is independent. If the case is reused and applied to several periods, the inventory constraints are re-applied independently in each period. So if the minimum reformate inventory was 100 kbbl, then in each period matched with this case this minimum would be separately applied.

In order to view and modify the plant level inventories it is necessary to edit the plant model, or use case-level watch items.

Other tasks

The following are additional tasks you can carry out from the Plants page.

Customize the grid

Customize the grid from the Grid group of the Home ribbon tab:

• Click Find to show or hide a text field at the top of the grid to filter the grid contents. Type in the text field to show only the rows with text matching what you have typed. The matching text is highlighted in the grid. See Filters for more details.

• Click Columns to open a small dialog windows where you can drag column headers to remove columns from the grid. You can then drag the headers back to the grid to restore the columns. See Add and Remove Columns in Manage Columns for more details.

• Choose a View from the list, or click the cogwheel icon to remove a view or save any changes. See Views for more details.

Show per-period results

Click the Periods button in the Periods group of the Home ribbon tab to expands each row of the grid to show per-period optimization results.