Price-based coordination strategy for copper smelting process

Rigorous scheduling that uses hard heuristics and allows forceful shutdown of process units, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the copper smelting process always harms the process operation. This way of process scheduling often results in sub-optimal process operation. Although a flexible scheduling framework that empowers process units to make independent operational decisions is desirable, the inter-dependencies among these units continue to pose a challenge in its design. This study presents a hierarchical scheduling framework for the copper smelting process, which uses price-based heuristics to resolve process inter-dependencies among the process units. These inter-dependencies arise due to the bottlenecks present in the process. Taking advantage of market theory, the coordinator uses PI controllers to find the appropriate prices to address the inter-dependencies. Two case studies are presented to demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively resolves all the process inter-dependencies, indicating its potential for application in other large-scale scheduling applications.