An integrated formulation for hierarchical cast design problems in the steel making industry

作者：Song Sang Hwa^*

来源：International Journal of Production Research, 2014, 52(5): 1443-1454.

DOI：10.1080/00207543.2013.844374

• production design
• steel making industry
• multi-stage bin packing problem

Production design is a key decision problem of steel making industry but due to its complexity, solution properties are not well understood. The design problem can be viewed as a multi-stage problem of bin packing, matching and sequencing sub-problems. Traditionally a sequential approach which treats each sub-problem separately has been applied to the simple case where mould width change is not allowed. However, for more general cases where casting with width change and different width is allowed, the sequential approach fails to generate good solutions. In this paper, we propose a mathematical programming formulation which can solve the design problem in an integrative way. By introducing multi-layer network representation of the cast design problem, it is now possible to generate an integrated formulation for the proposed problem. Based on the formulation, we derive a heuristic algorithm. The algorithm is adopted and tested at a large international integrated steel mill. The computational tests with real data-sets show that the proposed algorithm is quite effective and practical.

• 出版日期2014-3-4