Volume 27: Closing Carbon Cycles – A Transformation Process Involving Technology, Economy, and Society: Part II

Multi-Objective Production Scheduling of a Steel Plant With Electric Arc Furnaces Pengfei Su, Yue Zhou, Jianzhong Wu

Abstract

Energy costs constitute a significant expense for steel plants with electric arc furnaces (EAFs). To reduce energy costs, industrial processes actively participate in demand response by moving energy-consuming activities to low-price periods. On the other hand, conventional production scheduling mainly cares about the makespan via weighing the product demand and inventory. However, minimising energy costs and makespan are usually conflicting objectives. Therefore, we present a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MOMILP) model for addressing the production scheduling problem of a steel plant with EAFs. The Normal Boundary Intersection (NBI) method is used to derive an evenly distributed Pareto frontier for better evaluating the trade-off between electricity costs reduction and the time saving of production completion. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated in the case study.

Keywords Industrial demand-side management, multi-objective optimisation, production scheduling, steel manufacturing