Modeling a Lot-Aware Slab Stack Shuffling Problem

Stacking and shuffling problems are key logistics problems in various areas such as container shipping or steel industry. The aim of this paper is motivated by a real world instance arised in steel production. Slabs, continously but randomly casted, need to be arranged for transport while having a certain number of buffer stacks available. The optimization problem arising is assigning transport lotnumbers, regarding properties of slabs, as well as minimizing shuffling movements while arranging the slabs, regarding the implicitly given transport order. For that purpose, a combined optimization problem, being composed of two sub-problems is developed. Further computational studies are conducted in order to investigate the complexity of the problem. A combined solution approach is developed solving the problem in a sequential way using customized algorithms in order to make advantage of specialised algorithms.

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