Methods for steel production rescheduling oriented by operating time variations

Abstract

In steelmaking and continuous casting production processes, the operating time delay often occurs, which may lead to casting break or processing conflict so that the initial scheduling plan becomes unrealizable. It is more difficult to reschedule because of the multiple parallel machines in the whole production process and multi-refining number. This paper first develops a strategic model for tackling operation time disturbance with the goal of minimizing the difference factors in maximum completion time, processing time and equipment assignment. Then, a modified migrating bird optimization algorithm (MMBO) is proposed to task this problem a classification method and a parallel pushing algorithm are designed to draw production plan for unfinished charges. Moreover, the results of simulation experiment show that the proposed method is most effective. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to a large steel plant to show that the method can obviously shorten the redundant waiting time for all charges.