A Hybrid Algorithm for the Cutting-Lines-Oriented Steel Plate Yard Outbound Problem

This paper considers the outbound operation of the steel plate yard oriented to the cutting lines in shipbuilding. According to the daily cutting plan, the yard should arrange the outbound order of cutting plates and the relocation strategy for the blocking plates. The objective of this problem is to minimize the makespan of the outbound and cutting operations. A hybrid algorithm composed of two parts is introduced to solve this problem. In the first part, two heuristics are proposed to decide the outbound order. And the second part is a mixed integer programming model determining the relocation strategy. The experiment based on the actual cutting data is conducted to show the performance of the proposed method.