A variable neighborhood search algorithm for scheduling the hot rolling operations at a steel mill

One of the most important operations to occur in a steel mill is the hot rolling, a process which transforms steel slabs into much longer and much thinner coils. Selecting which slabs to roll and in which order is a problem that needs to be solved efficiently taking into account both technical and commercial parameters. In this paper, we develop an algorithm that uses several different neighbourhood search operators to robustly find high-quality solutions in a short computation time, even for large real-life problems. Some preliminary tests on artificially generated instances show that the algorithm performs satisfactorily.