Scheduling Time-Critical Flowshops: An Example from the Steel Industry

Production in metals and chemicals industry imposes tight maximal time lag constraints between some process stages, leading to time-critical flowshop problems that are characterized by constraints restricting the work-in-progress inventory at some stations to be effectively zero. We study a complex industrial scheduling problem arising from steel manufacturing with time-critical flowshop structure. Our core problem has a flowshop structure with multiple modes and recipes, sequence dependent setup times, strict precedence constraints between certain jobs, and inventory considerations.

We present a novel approach to solve this class of problems by decomposing it into stages and integrating integer programming (IP) with constraint programming (CP) through logic-based Benders decomposition. We enhance our technique with a special class of aggregate resource use inequalities, obtained through a detailed constraint programming based schedule for each job. We further strengthen our formulation through the polyhedral study of an important common substructure, single machine scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times problem. Our solution method has been successfully deployed in the daily operations of a large integrated steelmaker with improvements in ontime delivery from 75% to over 90%.

By: Fatima Kilinç-Karzan, Jayant R. Kalagnanam, Andrew J. Davenport, Stuart Siegel, Chandra Reddy

Published in: RC25065 in 2010

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