SUMMARY During short-term scheduling in a steel plant, one problem is to know beforehand how long equipment will be usable and when it will have to be maintained. The proposed system answers this question for a part in a continuous caster in order to inform another system that schedules short-term production. It uses fuzzy inference rules to process input data and to compute the life-expectancy...

Steel production is an extremely complex process and finding its coherent schedules for the wide variety of production steps in a dynamic environment, where disturbances frequently occur, is a challenging task. In the steel production process, the blast furnace continuously produces liquid iron, which is transformed into liquid steel in the melt shop. The majority of the molten steel passes thr...

During short-term scheduling in a steel plant, one problem is to know beforehand how long equipment will be usable and when it will have to be maintained. The present system answers this question for a part in a continuous caster in order to inform another system that schedules short-term production. It uses fuzzy inference rules to process input data and to compute the life-expectancy of the p...

The batch machine scheduling of continuous caster with flexible jobs is first proposed based on its character. The difference with classical problem is first summarized. The preprocess of the problem based on rule is proposed, and then the mathematical model with minimizing setup costs is proposed. To improve the efficiency of local search, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is introduced, a...

Steel production is a complex process and finding coherent and effective schedules for the wide variety of production steps, in a dynamic environment, is a challenging task. In this paper we propose a multi-agent architecture for integrated dynamic scheduling of the hot strip mill and the continuous caster. The scheduling systems of these processes have very different objectives and constraints...

A two-dimensional heat transfer model for transient simulation and control of a continuous steel slab caster is described. Slab thermal and solidification conditions are computed by the model as a function of time-varying casting speed, secondary spray cooling water flow rates and temperature, slab thickness, steel chemistry, and pouring and ambient temperatures. A solidification model that inc...

Štore Steel Ltd. is one of the major flat spring steel producers in Europe. Until 2016 company used a three-strand continuous casting machine with 6 m radius, when it was replaced by completely new two-strand caster 9 radius. For comparison tensile strength 41 hypoeutectoid grades, we conducted 1847 tests during first period testing using old caster, and 713 second caster. It found that for 11 ...