Will MATLAB optimize a production schedule with many constraints?

I have a continuous production process that has ~500 different configurations (thickness, width, materials, coatings, etc) for a coil of plastic. Some of the configurations can process interchangeably without process interruption, others require a non-production coil to be used in order to maintain the continuity of the process. The way to determine if a non-production coil is needed is defined in a list of ~20 constraints. The goal is to create a daily production schedule of 100 coils that minimize the use of the non-production coils. Will MATLAB be able to solve this problem?

[John D'Errico]

This is the class of problem that linear programming (and integer variants) have classically been used to solve. Of course, it depends on the constraints. They need to be formulated in a linear form.

Answer 1

[Alan Weiss]

This sounds like a job for intlinprog from Optimization Toolbox™. Take a look at the examples of mixed-integer linear programming in the documentation.

Good luck,

Alan Weiss

MATLAB mathematical toolbox documentation

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

If the problem cannot be framed as a mixed integer problem like Alan suggests, you could model the system using SimEvents and then optimize the parameters of it with a global optimization solver.