Operational research in the Danish steel industry

During the past five years several OR-projects (M.Sc. Thesis) were carried out at IMSOR. These OR-projects dealt with the development of decision support systems based upon heuristic principles, for various planning, production and control problems in the Danish steel industry. The purpose of this paper is to report the methodological experiences of these projects. This paper illustrates the optimization of an existing production system using heuristics. Furthermore, the overall concept of optimizing production systems without changing the physical elements of the production system is discussed. This paper also deals with OR-projects concerning: the inventory system, jobs sequencing and production flow management. Furthermore, the paper briefly reports on two ongoing projects: a rather complicated cutting-stock problem, and a booking system for plates’ orders.