Practical Production Scheduling for Hot Metal Pretreatment-Steelmaking-Continuous Casting Process Involving Preventive Maintenance Consideration

Preventive maintenance is significant for health management of production system, while the maintenance plan is seldom simultaneously considered in the decision-making process of production scheduling. This paper studies a practical production scheduling problem for the hot metal pretreatment-steelmaking-continuous casting process involving preventive maintenance consideration (denoted as PSCCPM scheduling). A mathematical programming model is designed for the PSCCPM scheduling by considering constraints related to the maintenance plan and other production process requirements. An effective heuristic containing a machine allocation procedure and a conflict eliminate procedure is developed first to obtain a good feasible schedule of this model. Subsequently, by using the heuristic as a decoding algorithm, an adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA) featuring a novel adaptive evolutionary strategy is presented to obtain a suboptimal solution. Experimental results based on instances generated from a realistic steel plant show the effectiveness of the proposed AGA for solving PSCCPM scheduling problems.