Balancing Production Capacity of Steelmaking by Considering the Demands of Downstream Processes

For steel production, due to the characteristics of long process flow, batch production model, limited capacity of bottleneck units and strict delivery requirements, how to balance the production capacity of different units in each stage is an important problem to be solved arising in production management. In this paper, we concentrate on the planning problem at the steelmaking stage with goal of balancing the production capacity of units in the entire production system. To solve the problem, we propose a hierarchical solution framework in which the demands of downstream stages are transmitted to steelmaking stage through planned time windows and a combination of mixed integer programing model and local search heuristics is employed to balance the capacity of units in steelmaking stage. To verify the performance of the proposed solution framework, computational tests are conducted on synthetic instances. The results show the efficiency of the proposed solution framework.