Ant stigmergy on the grid: optimizing the cooling process in continuous steel casting

The paper presents a new distributed metaheuristic algorithm in an optimal control problem related to the cooling process in the continuous casting of steel. The optimization task is to tune 18 coolant flows in the caster secondary cooling system to achieve the target surface temperatures along the slab. Sequential search algorithms are proved inefficient for this problem because they take too much time to compute an appropriate solution. For this reason a new distributed search algorithm based on stigmergy perceived in ant colony was developed. The algorithm was run on the grid that allows us to solve this optimization problem in much shorter time. As a matter of fact, the computation time can be decreased from half a day to a few hours without any decrease in the solution quality