Steel production schedule generation

In this paper, an iron and steel production scheduling problem is studied. An algorithm based on an implicit enumeration procedure is developed to solve the problem. Due to the large number of practical constraints, the real-world scheduling problem can be efficiently solved by the enumeration based algorithm within acceptable computation time. The method is applied to generate steel production schedules for a steel production company in Canada. The computer generated schedules are compared with the manually generated and currently used schedules in the company. Computational results show large potential savings from the optimal schedules over the manually generated schedules.