The hot strip mill production scheduling problem: A tabu search approach

The Hot Strip Mill Production Scheduling Problem is a hard problem that arises in the steel industry when scheduling steel coil production. It can be modeled as a generalization of the Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with multiple and conflicting objectives and constraints. In this paper we formulate this problem as a mathematical program and propose a heuristic method to determine good approximate solutions. The heuristic is based on Tabu Search and a new idea called " Cannibalization ". Computational results on production data from Dofasco are presented and analyzed. Comparison with actual production schedules indicates that the proposed method could produce significantly better schedules. 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.