Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Kangbok Lee (POSTECH, Korea). The title is "Scheduling Heuristics for Steelmaking Continuous Casting Processes". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, February 16 at 14:00 UTC.

Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/91094063787?pwd=d01UbWRPOHJQUy93dnBhWU5QclRLQT09 Meeting ID: 910 9406 3787 Passcode: 284143

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows. Steelmaking-Continuous Casting (SCC) is a bottleneck in the steel production process and its scheduling has become more challenging over time. In this paper, we provide an extensive literature review that highlights challenges in the SCC scheduling and compares existing solution methods. From the literature review, we collect the essential features of an SCC process, such as unrelated parallel machine environments, stage skipping, and maximum waiting time limits in between successive stages. We consider an SCC scheduling problem with as objective the minimisation of the weighted sum of cast break penalties, total waiting time, total earliness, and total tardiness. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear programming model and develop an iterated greedy matheuristic that solves its subproblems to find a near-optimal solution. Through numerical experiments, we show that our algorithm outperforms two types of genetic algorithms when applied to test instances.

The next talk in our series will be given by: John W. Fowler (Arizona State Univ.) | March 2 | Scheduling Problems in Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication Facilities: Part 1

For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek, Mike and Guohua