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 Saleman 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.