Splittable order planning problem with consideration of changeover costs

This paper focuses on the order planning problem derived from the practical production in cold rolling area, which is to determine the plan of orders in the productions lines of the cold rolling area with the objective of minimizing the changeover costs incurred by changing rollers or adjusting the annealing temperature. In the problem, the candidate orders are splittable, since the coils belonging to an order distributes in multiple production lines. To solve the problem, a mathematical programming model with nonlinear constraints is formulated. After linearizing the nonlinear constraints, the model is solved by CPLEX. Finally, the performance of the solution method is evaluated by the computational experiments based on the randomly generated instances.