Production Scheduling in a Steelmaking and Continuous Casting Plant: a Case Study

This paper deals with the scheduling of operations in a Steelmaking and Continuous Casting (SM-CC) plant. In particular, we consider a real case study of an integrated plant located in the North of Italy. First, we describe in details the SM-CC process of the considered system by using the Unified Modeling Language. Second, we focus on the schedule of casts on the continuous casting machine that is subject to different types of setup operations. With the objective of minimizing the maximum completion time, the schedule of the continuous casting machine is modeled by a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation. An example enlightens how a proper scheduling of the casts is of basic importance to obtain good system performances.