Scheduling of Jobs in the Continuous Casting Stage of Steel Production

Abstract

This paper studies a steel production planning problem and presents a formulation for the problem of scheduling jobs in the continuous casting stage. This problem generalises the single-machine minimum tardiness family scheduling problem and is characterised by additional constraints that at any point in time the cumulative hot metal demand must not exceed the amount supplied by the blast furnace and that, because of limited storage capacity for hot metal, a minimum quantity of hot metal must be consumed at any point in time. We propose a methodology for solving the problem and evaluate its performance against a commercial mixed-integer programming (MIP) solver. Our experiments indicate that high quality solutions can be found in only a fraction of time required by the MIP-solver.