Energy-Efficient Integration Optimization of Production Scheduling and Ladle Dispatching in Steelmaking Plants

The existing production scheduling mode ignores ladle dispatching resulting in the increase of energy consumption in ladle heating and instability in production. Hence, we study the energy-efficient integration optimization of production scheduling and ladle dispatching in this paper. Specifically, a mixed integer linear programming model is formulated to coordinate the time-dependent correlations between them and quantify the energy consumption of them. Moreover, an enhanced migrating birds optimization algorithm (EMBO) is proposed to tackle this NP-hard integration optimization problem. In this proposed algorithm, a three-level rule-based heuristic decoding is designed to achieve the optimal solutions at the given production sequence; well-designed neighborhood structures are appended to intensify exploration; a simulated annealing-based acceptance criterion is hired to escape from local optima. Additionally, a novel competitive mechanism for birds regrouping is developed to increase the population diversity by information exchange between the left and right lines of V-formation. Mass experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EMBO observably outperforms all the compared algorithms, and the proposed integration optimization decreases the energy-consumption by 1.21% in the context of constant production efficiency.