Steel scheduling optimization for IPSCO's rolling mill and reheat furnace

Energy savings and higher production rates are two important objectives that today's iron and steel industry is trying to achieve. One of the possible ways to reach these targets is through optimal production scheduling. In this paper, an iron and steel production scheduling problem is studied. An efficient algorithm based on a modified enumeration procedure is developed to solve the problem within acceptable computational time. The method is applied to generate steel production schedules in IPSCO. The method showed great potential savings over the existing scheduling method in IPSCO.