Heuristic Algorithms for a New and Practical Wire Rod and Bar Rolling Scheduling Problem

A scheduling problem in a wire rod and bar rolling process is very important and hard to solve in practical steel production systems. This paper considers a new scheduling problem originated from a wire rod and bar rolling process considering job release time and due time, as well as setup time between consecutive jobs. The objectives are to minimize both the number of late jobs and total setup times. Their linear combination is used to measure a schedule. To solve such a practical scheduling problem, four effective algorithms were designed. The experimental results show that all of the presented algorithms can well solve the considered problem. Among them, iterated greedy algorithm shows the best solution accuracy. Its great performance implies its readiness to be used in practical industrial scheduling systems.