A Two Stage Heuristic Approach for the Continuous Casting Planning

Abstract Continuous casting planning plays an important role in improving the production rate and energy saving in the iron and steel industry. In this paper, we study continuous casting planning arising in a major steel company in China. Due to the complication of the problem, a two-stage model mathematics model is set up to analyze the twin strand continuous casting planning. Since the model is NP-hard and very difficult to achieve satisfied solution, we develop two efficient methods (Genetic Algorithm and Tabu Search Method) to solve it. The precision of the model and the effectiveness of the algorithms are shown through simulation results on actual production data from the steel company.