Development of production management technologies in steel industry

Abstract

Production management technologies such as production planning and scheduling are reviewed together with planning and scheduling for logistics of products in steel industry. First, research topics in last decade on fundamental theories and related technologies concerning optimization such as scheduling, meta-heuristic methods for optimization, branch and bound method, Lagrange relaxation, multi agents and inference system by AI are described. Next, applications of optimization technologies to production planning and scheduling in steel industry are introduced. Reports on production managements for steel industry such as iron and steel making, rolling, surface finishing and inventory management together with transportation of steel products are reviewed. These technologies have been applied to production management of steel industry in various ways from single individual process to combined plural production processes. Finally, future challenge items are proposed. These are intelligence for production system, large scale optimization for production management cooperating plural processes, supply chain management system for steel production and accumulation and reuse of human knowledge for advanced steel production.