Coordination of Production and Transportation Scheduling in Steel Making Process

Steel making process is the key process where the product quality of the finished steel is mainly determined. The process consists of LD converter, secondary refining and continuous caster. From the refining of steel by LD converter to the solidification by continuous caster, a large amount of molten steel with high temperature is processed. In the process, a lot of steel lots are reduced and transported in steel pots to cope with the product demands. It is very important to control temperature of the molten steel at a certain level during transportation to assure the safety operation in continuous caster. The problem is to determine production schedule of the steel making considering temperature drop of all pots during treatment and transportation. The scheduling method using agent model based on the ant algorithm is applied to the transportation and the production scheduling for steel making process in steel works. Scheduling combining the ant algorithm and the temperature calculation model to check temperature constraints in the process is made. The practicability of the developed scheduling method is checked numerically comparing results of actual operations in steel works.