The scheduling of steel-making and continuous casting process using branch and cut method via CPLEX optimization

The steel-making and continuous casting process is the connection between the iron process and the rolling process; it is the bottleneck in the iron and steel production. A better scheduling of this process is the key factor to ensure the whole production in a well-organized rhythm for iron and steel production manufacturing productivity. The branch and cut method in the standard commercial solver CPLEX is introduced to solve the scheduling problem. The linearization methods for the linear conversion are highlighted. Due to the limited calculation time requirement about the scheduling results and the scale of the problem, special methods for the efficiency tuning are applied according to the characters of the problem. Numerical testing supported by Shanghai Bashan steel plant demonstrated that the computational results show significant improvement compared to the traditional manual scheduling results.