Batch production planning method based on the order characteristics for cold mill

The cold rolling mill is the necessary process, in which the production planning of mill corresponds with one of the whole production flow. For solving the production scheduling problem of the whole process of cold rolling, according to the relation between the cold rolling mill and the whole production flow, the production planning of the mill is made. In this paper the problem is reduced to an asymmetric double traveling salesman problem with time windows and the multi-objective model and the multi-objective adaptive section researching ant colony algorithm are presented. Besides the constraints, such as the change in width and thick of entrance and exit, the continuous production is considered in the procedure for the solution and the relevant searching strategy is employed in the different computing stage. The simulation is conducted with the practical data from a cold rolling plant and the results indicate that the proposed method is effective.