Improved Ant Colony System for Cast Planning Problem with Consideration of On-line Mould Width Adjustment

Cast planning problem is the basis of steelmaking-continuous casting (SCC) scheduling. The paper focuses on the cast planning problem and adjusts the constraints of the traditional model which is idealization. Considering the application of on-line mold width adjustment in actual production, the paper reconstructs the model with the goal of minimizing the total planning cost, then establishes a cast planning model that considers on-line mold width adjustment, transforms it into a vehicle routing problem (VRP). An improved ant colony system (IACS) based on rules such as node sorting rule and node transfer rule is designed to solve the problem. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm are verified by experiments.