An Efficient Heuristic Algorithm for Pickling Line in Esfahan's Mobarakeh Steel Company

Reducing production costs has become one of the most important concerns, due to the economic development and increasing competitiveness in industries. To achieve this goal, considering real conditions is important. In this presentation, we investigate the production scheduling of a Pickling Line in Esfahan's Mobarakeh Steel Company called Pickling Line Scheduling (PLS). The problem is to generate multiple production turns for the Pickling Line coils and at the same time determine the sequence of these turns and select coils then the sequence coils of these turn so that the productivity and product quality both maximized while the production cost minimized. We formulate this problem as a mixed integer nonlinear program and propose a heuristic algorithm to obtain satisfactory solutions. Results on real production instances show heuristic algorithm is more effective and efficient with comparison to manual scheduling in Esfahan's Mobarakeh Steel Company.