Storage Space Allocation in Material Yards of Integrated Iron and Steel Plants

A nonlinear mathematical model is presented for the storage space allocation problem in material yards of integrated iron and steel plants with the objective function of reducing transportation costs and keeping material components.An improved tabu search algorithm is developed to solve it by using an iterated local search strategy based on random kick moves as a method to escape from local optima.The neighborhood in iterated local search is generated by cyclic exchange moves.The test with 150 random data sets shows that the tabu search with iterated local search strategy achieving global diversification is a fast and effective near optimal algorithm to solve such practical industry problems.