A comprehensive solution for continuous casting production planning and scheduling

Abstract

Production planning and scheduling in steelmaking-continuous casting (SCC) process consists of decision making about three important issues: consolidating orders into charges, grouping charges into casts, and scheduling the casts on machines. In contrast to earlier investigations that mostly focus on one of these issues, a comprehensive twophase approach is presented in this paper in order to solve the whole problem. In the first phase, a continuous-time formulation is developed to determine what casts in what sequences should be scheduled on which machines. The solution obtained is then used as an optimal framework to create the final schedule in the second phase where the assignment rules embedded in a heuristic algorithm are used to consolidate orders into charges and group charges into casts. This method has been successfully used for Mobarakeh Steel Company (MSC), the biggest steel enterprise in the Middle East. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed method substantially increases the productivity in MSC.

Scheduling in Continuous Steelmaking Casting: A Systematic Review

“…The selection of this inclusion criterion has been made taking into account the objectives of the study and relying on similar studies carried out. 24,25) From the application of these new criteria, a total of 121 documents were obtained, as can be seen in Fig. 3.…”

Integrated Scheduling for Steelmaking Continuous Casting— Hot Rolling Processes considering Hot Chain Logistics

“…Constraint (14) ensures that charging time of slab j is after its ready time. Constraints (15) and (16) ensure that the interval time between two continuously rolled slabs. Constraint (17) defines the variable c j .…”

“…For problems of flexible flow shop scheduling in SCC process, optimization approaches include mathematical programming [6][7][8][9], metaheuristics which includes artificial bee colony algorithm [10], evolutionary programming [11], tabu search [12], particle swarm optimization algorithm [13], bilayer optimization approaches [14], two-phase heuristic algorithm [15], and hybrid algorithm [16]. Considering the uncertainty of the SCC process, Ye et al [17] proposed a robust optimization method, and Hao et al [18] proposed a soft-decision approach based on two-layered scheduling.…”

Modeling and solving the steelmaking and casting scheduling problem

“…To solve real instances of large size (with more than 500 jobs), the authors developed and compared different search heuristics: a greedy procedure to quickly obtain a feasible solution, and a large neighborhood search procedure to improve the incumbent one. Finally, Yadollahpour and Arbab Shirani () devised a two phase approach: in the first phase, a CP procedure is used to group jobs into casts and assign them to casters in a continuous‐time domain; in the second phase, the sequences obtained are reoptimized by a heuristic algorithm taking into account new additional assignment rules. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated against a greedy procedure on two pilot data tests.…”