Heuristic algorithms for scheduling heat-treatment furnaces of steel casting industries

Abstract

This paper addresses a research problem of scheduling parallel, nonidentical batch processors in the presence of dynamic job arrivals, incompatible job-families and non-identical job sizes. We were led to this problem through a realworld application involving the scheduling of heat-treatment operations of steel casting. The scheduling of furnaces for heat-treatment of castings is of considerable interest as a large proportion of the total production time is the processing times of these operations. In view of the computational intractability of this type of problem, a few heuristic algorithms have been designed for maximizing the utilization of heat-treatment furnaces of steel casting manufacturing. Extensive computational experiments were carried out to compare the performance of the heuristics with the estimated optimal value (using the Weibull technique) and for relative effectiveness among the heuristics. Further, the computational experiments show that the heuristic algorithms proposed in this paper are capable of obtaining near (statistically estimated) optimal utilization of heat-treatment furnaces and are also capable of solving any large size real-life problems with a relatively low computational effort.

Flexible job-shop scheduling problem with resource recovery constraints

“…Scheduling of heat-treatment operations of steel casting is studied by Mathirajan et al [115]. In this scheduling problem, the jobs (castings) are classified into a number of job families based on the alloy type.…”

Diagnostic system with an artificial neural network which determines a diagnostic information for the servicing of a reparable technical object

“…In view of the fact that the purpose of a diagnosis of the object [10][11][12][13][14][15][18][19][20][21] is the recognition of its state in the values of the accepted logic of states' assessment, the results obtained in the form of relation (4) were subject to the classification process according to the diagram presented in Fig. 11.…”

“…2 The structure of diagnostic system for the diagnosis of a technical object The modern diagnostic system [2,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] (Fig. 3) utilizes not only a measurement A/D converter card with appropriate signal interfaces but also some computer tool used for proper signal registration as well as for acquiring and processing data registered.…”

Heuristics for Non-dominated Sets of Two-Agent Scheduling on a Single Parallel-Batching Machine

“…Parallel-batching machines are encountered in many industries, such as the burn-in oven in the semiconductor industry [1], the heat-treatment furnace in the meta working industry [2], and the harden oven in the aircraft industry [3]. This type of parallelbatching machines is often a bottleneck due to some inevitable factors such as equipment cost, energy consumption, installation space limitation, environmental requirement and high competition, etc.…”