(614a) A Planning and Scheduling System for a Stainless Steel Melt Shop

The steel industry suffers today from a global overcapacity, which pushes both the demand and the steel prices down. In order to survive and maximize the profit also during low production volumes, steelmakers must ensure that the operational costs are kept as low as possible and the production can flexibly adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

This presentation discusses a MILP-based optimization system for meltshop scheduling at a stainless steel plant. The solution is flexible and thus easily adaptable and configurable to different plant layouts. The system allows for modeling individual characteristics of parallel equipment, particular processing and changeover times, scarce resources and maintenance requests.

The presented melt shop scheduling module is generally applicable to different steel plants and enables various ways to express add-on features. Here, main solution features and development steps are shown and explained. An industrial-size example illustrates the potential benefits and solution time for a typical model instance. Potential benefits do not only comprise lower production costs but also contribute to reduced energy demand and respectively lower emissions.