MasDISPO_xt: heat and sequence optimisation based on simulated trading inside the supply chain of steel production
Sven Jacobi, David Raber, Klaus Fischer · 2008
The production of steel normally constitutes the inception of most Supply Chains in different areas. Steel manufacturing companies are strongly affected by bull whip effects. Due to nondeterministic incoming orders and changes of customer requirements on accepted orders, making the right decision at a certain stage can be the difference between earning or loosing a great turnover. Improving their operational efficiency is required to keep a competitive position on the market. Therefore, flexible planning and scheduling systems are needed to support these processes which are based on considerable amounts of data which can hardly be processed manually. Existing systems are dominated by centralized decision making processes, mostly data driven and often not modeling the business processes they should. MasDISPO xt is an agent-based generic online planning and online scheduling system for monitoring of the complete Supply Chain of Saarstahl AG, a globally respected steel manufacturer. This paper concentrates on the creation and optimisation of heats and sequences as a presetting for the production inside the steelwork. 1. PRODUCTION AT SAARSTAHL AG The production chain of the Saarstahl AG consists of a multitude of specialized and complex metallurgical manufacturing processes with a lot of interdependencies among them. First, a blast furnace factory produces hot metal for the steel production. In certain intervals equally distributed over the day, a certain quantity of hot metal is sent by rail to the steel works for the next production step. Inside the melting shop, steel of different quality grades is produced according to concrete customer orders and requirements. It is cast at continuous casting plants into billets. A single production unit inside the steel works is called heat grouped together in sequences – a totallly ordered set of similar heats of equal formats and qualities.