Optimum Steelmaking Charge Plan with Unknown Charge Number Based on the Pseudo TSP Model

This paper presents a mathematical charge plan model of steelmaking-continuous casting (SCC) scheduling in the computer integrated manufacturing systems environment. Based on the analysis of the difficulty to solve the scheduling problem, a pseudo travel salesman problem model is presented to describe the scheduling model. By using this method, we can solve the optimum charge problem even without known the charge number, while other methods must know the charge number previously. To solve the problem, an improved particle swarm optimization with variant moving direction of the particle in every dimension is presented. The effect of the mutation rate is also discussed. Simulations have been carried and the results show that the pseudo travel salesman problem is very fit for describe the model. The computation with practical data shows that the model and the solving method are very effective