Raw materials for industrial steel-making plants need to be stored in material yards in order to satisfy various production requirements. The stored materials are supplied to production plants by belt-conveyors with multiple alternative transportation routes. The simultaneous optimization of the storage allocation and transportation routing for the raw materials yard is required for achieving production that is flexible to changes in demand. In this paper, we propose a Lagrangian decomposition and coordination approach for storage allocation and routing for a belt-conveyor transportation system to handle demand changes. The overall problem is decomposed into an allocation planning subproblem and a transportation routing subproblem. A near-optimal solution for allocation planning and transportation routing is derived by repeating each optimization of subproblems and multiplier updates. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed in numerical experiments.
Synopsis :In recent years, system technologies have been developed remarkably and also indispensable for steelmaking processes, especially for guaranteeing higher quality of products as well as realizing higher efficiency and lower cost in manufacturing. In this paper, a state-of-the-art survey concerning the development and the utilization of system technologies is presented with some typical examples, and future directions are discussed based on the analysis of the current situations and issues.
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