Study on Recipe Cost Optimization System Based on Ant Colony Algorithms

Optimizing the complex product charge, especially in steel enterprises, is challenging because that the species of the raw material is highly uncertain. Raw material should include metallic materials and alloys et al. We choose recipe of the alloying materials which are more expensively as optimization object. We give an effective model for the problem of minimizing cost of alloying materials, and build an information system. We deduce some optimality properties for this problem such that effects of harmful elements, burning losses, mass change. Moreover the target composition, the most important effect which depends on the corporate standard, has been taken into account. Based on these properties, we propose a heuristic algorithm - ant colony algorithm to generate an approximate set of efficient solutions. The information system is applied in a steel enterprise, and the result shows that the proposed algorithm performs better than the linear programming solver both in terms of solution quality and comprehensive performances.