The coordinated scheduling of steelmaking with multi-refining and tandem transportation

This article explores coordinated scheduling problem arising in steelmaking and multi-refining operations. Jobs are first processed in converters and then transported downstream to be processed in refining furnaces in which two different transporters are employed in tandem at the stage of transportation. There exist multi-refining jobs. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time satisfying no transporters conflict and buffer space. For the model, we develop a tabu search algorithm and provide the worst case analysis. Computational tests are evaluated to show the efficiency brought by the tabu search algorithm relative to lower bound and sequenced and separately algorithm.