Scheduling Optimization of Coal Washing Process Based on Two-Stage Fuzzy Heuristic Algorithm

Coal washing and sorting plays a vital role for coal production. Reasonable scheduling of washing and sorting equipment, crushers and various coal silos in the coal washing and sorting process can effectively increase the total value of product coal and reduce the total energy consumption of equipment. In this paper, a multi-constrained nonlinear mixed integer programming model considering the start and stop of each equipment in the washing process is established to realize the specific regulation of the washing process. In order to overcome the problem such as local convergence when solving high-dimensional space problems, a two-stage fuzzy heuristic algorithm is proposed in this paper. In the first stage, a variety of population genetic algorithms based on fuzzy adaptive strategy control are designed for global search to establish an elite population bank to preserve high-quality individuals produced by various groups. In the second stage, an improved simulated annealing algorithm is used to perform a local search with a backtracking process on specific neighbors of individuals in the elite population bank, which can improve the stability of the algorithm and reduce the situation of falling into local convergence. Then the real data of a Chinese coal mining company was used for experiments, where the proposed algorithm is compared with other commonly used methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can increase the total coal value of the washed product by at least 1.7% compared to other algorithms, and the average total number of starts and stops of the equipment is reduced by about 7.3%, which are effectively beneficial for the related enterprise.