Model and algorithm for hot-rolling bath planning

To guarantee the feasibility of hot rolling scheduling plan and improve the efficiency of arranging the scheduling, according to the characteristics of the hot rolling production mode and rolling plan structure, a vehicle route problem (VRP) model was proposed to model the scheduling problem and a hybrid method was developed to solve the problem. In the hybrid approach, based on the global search ability, discrete artificial immune algorithm is used to search the optimal solution and simulated annealing is applied to avoid getting into a local optimum. The results on practical production data show that the model and the hybrid optimization approach are viable and effective for the hot rolling scheduling.