Scheduling in Continuous Steelmaking Casting: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The converter furnace and the continuous casting are the most important stages in steel production. Modern integrated processes directly connect the converter furnaces and the continuous casting machines with a flow of molten metal, and the steel is manufactured synchronously between the various machines. Starting from the traditional handmade programs for the management of these processes, during the last two decades there has been a notable increase in studies and publications in this field, trying to formulate scheduling in a rational and automatic way. The process has been approached for years through the development of both physical and operational research models, many of them theoretically. The main purpose of this study is to present a critical and in-depth evaluation of the previous studies, so that the state of the art of scheduling in steelworks can be evaluated. An approach based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been used, trying to search, evaluate, synthesize and analyze all the relevant studies for this specific field. As a result, the conclusions of the various analyses are presented and a study route is proposed for the design of the optimal planning methodology in the steelworks.

An improved imperialist competitive algorithm for hybrid flowshop rescheduling in steelmaking-refining-continuous casting process

“…Three termination conditions are used in this paper, that is, 10, 20, and 30 s. For each termination condition, each compared algorithm is run 10 times independently, the average result of the ten runs is calculated, and further served as the performance of the algorithm. Relative percentage increase (RPI) is calculated for comparing these algorithms, which is calculated by Formula (2).…”

“…In this paper, to show the effectiveness of the presented IICA, three kinds of ICA in the literature are employed for comparison. The three kinds of ICA are listed as follows, (1) the basic ICA 18 (ICA), (2) an improved ICA devised by Shokrollahpour et al 19 (ICA S ), and (3) hybrid ICA proposed by Ghasemishabankareh et al 24 (HICA). Note that the PMX operator is employed for the ICA and HICA, since the corresponding assimilation operation is not suitable for the SCC rescheduling.…”

“…It has special characteristics such as high temperature, high weight, and high energy consumption. 1 Steelmaking-refining-Continuous Casting (SCC) 2 is the bottleneck of the iron and steel production process, 3,4 therefore, scheduling the SCC process, that is, SCC scheduling, is a key and complicated problem. The SCC scheduling is NP-hard, 1,5 and can be modeled as hybrid flowshop scheduling.…”

Development of a Steel Plant Rescheduling Algorithm Based on Batch Decisions

“…Most of the algorithms developed for improving the effectivity of a rescheduling in the continuous casting machine process are focused on obtained a quick response from the system, gaining agility when reprogramming all the tasks in the different stations [36], but none of them try to take advantage of reprogramming the batch decisions previously taken, changing only the MPS. Because of this, the algorithm proposed is a suitably tool for any steel plan, no matter which scheduling algorithm is used.…”

“…However, despite these advances, it is common that a manual rescheduling takes place, minimizing the loss of time in the workshop [36]. The main reason for this manual rescheduling is the faster human reaction to unexpected events [37], based on their understanding and knowledge of past experiences.…”