A predictive reactive scheduling method for color-coating production in steel industry

It is a difficult but challenging task for complex steel production to find effective schedules in a dynamic environment. In this paper, a predictive reactive scheduling method for the color-coating production in steel industry is investigated. In a practical production environment, the originally established schedules often need to be adjusted due to some unexpected events, which will break down the production continuity. Reactive scheduling is, therefore, essential for the production scheduling system to maintain the production continuity by reconciling the conflict between the originally established schedules and the current production status of the factory. To efficiently cope with such unexpected events, we propose a matching-up model whose objective is to minimize the impact on the originally established schedule and maintain its good quality. The experimental results on instances collected from practical production data show that the proposed method can provide robust and high quality schedules under a real-time production environment.