Constraint-based approach for steelmaking-continuous casting scheduling

Steelmaking-continuous casting production scheduling is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, a constraint-based approach is presented to solve steelmaking-continuous casting production scheduling problem in integrated steel production environment. We treat the steelmaking-continuous casting scheduling problem as a constraint satisfaction problem. The optimization objective is to minimize the total waiting time between adjacent stages of all Heats. In the solving process, the temporal feasible initial schedule is constructed firstly by using variable selection and value selection heuristics. Secondly, the resource conflicts are eliminated through conflicts examination and conflicts elimination heuristics based on backjumping. The validity of the proposed model and approach is demonstrated by the computational examples.