Optimisation approach to power restoration in steel mills

The efficiency of the power systems for steel mills has become more important due to global competition. At the same time, reliability continues to be a major concern because of the high costs of disrupting a continuous steel making process. An optimisation-based solution for the steel mill restoration problem is presented. This is a mixed integer programming problem and as such has many local minima. A new global optimisation algorithm called Navigator for solving this problem is presented. This is applied to a sample steel mill power system to provide many reasonable solutions from which the mill operator can select.