Benders approach for the raw material transportation scheduling problem in steel industry

The steel industry consumes large amount of various bulk raw materials in daily production, which requires efficient transportation scheduling (i.e. integrated reclaimer and belt-conveyor scheduling). This paper proposes a mixed-integer programming model for the raw material transportation scheduling problem in steel industry. The problem is solved by an improved Benders decomposition method, which is enhanced by combinatorial Benders cut. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution method.