A case of rule-based heuristics for scheduling hot rolling seamless steel tube production

A production scheduling problem for hot rolling seamless steel tube at Tianjin Pipe Corporation of China is studied. Considering the complexity of the problem and the acceptable time for solving it, a rule-based heuristic approach is proposed and implemented. The proposed approach is a bottleneck scheduling method and considers simultaneously all production processes in three production units and ‘optimizes’ them as a whole. Additionally, the running result shows, on average, that a 3% increase in throughput and a 5% reduction in late deliveries have been achieved since the system implementation.