Production Planning for Agroalimentary Laboratories Using Customer Satisfaction Criteria

Agroalimentary laboratories typically process samples that require different types of analysis depending on the substance being analyzed and the requirements of the clients. A key parameter for client satisfaction is the time that it takes since the samples arrive at the laboratory facilities and the results are provided to the client. Thus, the order in which the different samples are processed and the analysis are performed can have a significant impact in the overall customer satisfaction. This paper proposes a novel approach for planning the production of agroalimentary laboratories based on maximizing a measure of customer satisfaction derived from this lag between sample reception and analysis finalization. This way, a planning model is defined which, based on the basic version of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem, can be used to optimize an objective function that focuses on the client satisfaction, considering the relative relevance of clients and samples. The paper includes a detailed presentation of the parameters, variables and constraints required to define the problem, along with the corresponding modeling assumptions. The applicability of the approach is presented with a discussion of the solutions provided by the optimization problem for a set of scenarios of interest, which show the suitability of the method as a systematic tool for planning the operations of agroalimentary laboratories.