Large Scale Production Planning in the Stainless Steel Industry

Abstract

We introduce a new formulation for a cutting stock problem in the stainless steel industry. The formulation extends some previous models developed for the paper industry. In this formulation, mother coils are assumed to have finite lengths, and the widths and lengths of the mother coils are considered variables as well as the lengths of the product coils along with the cutting patterns to be used. To enable reuse of scrap material, the trim loss at the end of a mother coil is preferred and collected into a single coil. Finally, the scattering of an order to multiple mother coils is minimized to facilitate the shipping of the order in a single batch. For numerical solution, the inherently nonlinear problem is transformed to a linear one by a decomposition technique. The procedure is illustrated with numerical examples. The presented model has been successfully utilized in large scale industrial environment as a part of the production planning system developed for Outokumpu Stainless by Accenture.

Optimal plate design problem in steel production

“…They assumed the area of each bin was a constant, but the width and length of the bin could be different and considered as variables in the problem. Karelahti et al (2011) dealt with a large-scale production planning problem in the stainless-steel industry. This was an extension of the cutting stock problem where various sized mother coils and narrow order strips were considered which would lead to larger scale optimization problem compared to its counterpart in the paper industry.…”

Global Method for a Class of Operation Optimization Problem in Steel Rolling Systems

“…As with the chemical industry, iron and steel production is a process industry, − but it has its own characteristics, such as a production process with high temperature and high energy consumption, , production scheduling with complicated planning, , and different products with different phase changes and technologies. − Customer demands for small batches and varieties of products have been increasing recently. The product quality requirements in terms of strip thickness, strip crown, and strip flatness are also higher than ever.…”

Integrated Planning and Scheduling with Due Dates in the Corrugated Board Boxes Industry

“…The very first relevant works were developed by Gilmore and Gomory, − where patterns are pregenerated and considered as known vectors in a mixed-integer programming (MIP) optimization model that decides the number of them to produce. Given the NP-hard nature of the problem, many articles have proposed heuristic procedures to solve the CSPs. − However, some works also present optimization models to solve the problem in different industrial applications, such as cutting pieces of wood, stainless steel, paper rolls and glass industry . Erjavec et al considered the CSP to define raw material stock size.…”

“…Given the NP-hard nature of the problem, many articles have proposed heuristic procedures to solve the CSPs. 6−9 However, some works also present optimization models to solve the problem in different industrial applications, such as cutting pieces of wood, 10 stainless steel, 11 paper rolls 12 and glass industry. 13 Erjavec et al 14 considered the CSP to define raw material stock size.…”