Production Scheduling in a Steelmaking-Continuous Casting Plant

A relevant production scheduling problem that can be modeled and solved by using optimization techniques arises in steel-making industry. The strict requirements of the steel-making process defeated most of the earlier approaches and, to a large extent, human schedulers still outperform the existing computerized techniques. As a first step towards understanding the potential of new optimization models, we conducted some experimental evaluations of different approaches. By applying proven techniques from job shop literature to the alternative graph formulation of the problem, we obtained promising results that compares favorably with those obtained by human schedulers. We also show the need for detailed models, able to include all the constraints that are relevant for the scheduling problem.

(Joint work with Marco Pranzo.)

B.Hammer