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Scheduling Optimisation For Aluminium Smelter Cast Journal
Scheduling Optimisation For Aluminium Smelter Cast Journal
Scheduling Optimisation For Aluminium Smelter Cast Journal
Light Metals 2005 Edited by Halvor Kvande TMS (The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society), 2005
Keywords: open-shop, closed-shop, MRP, lot-sizing, logistics, mixed integer linear programming
Abstract
Traditionally, the planning of aluminum smelter casthouses which
Scheduling of cast house operations is difficult especially for multi- balances the supply of hot-metal feedstock to the casthouses from
product casting operations. The cast house operations are generally the pot-lines and the demand of alloyed product stocks from the
batch oriented where as the pot line operations continuously casthouses to the stock-pads for shipment is performed by material
produce hot metal which must be processed. This results in requirements planning systems ( MRP or MRP/II) available from
difficulties coordinating the pot line operations with the cast house enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors such as SAP,
operations, the net effect being sub optimal scheduling. JD Edwards or Baan. Though these tools can help significantly in
New technologies incorporating Mixed Integer Linear Programming the longer term big-bucket planning (or balancing) of forecasted
are able to not only solve this closed-shop scheduling problem but (spot or retail) and firm (contract or wholesale) sales orders with
also optimize this from both a logistics and quality perspective to the requirements of alumina and supporting materials and utilities
minimize costs and maximize profit. such as carbon and electrical power, they are not suitable for
shorter-term small bucket scheduling of production found in the
There are considerable gains to be realized by optimally scheduling casthouses [2] given their lack of production details mainly their
the flow of hot metal from reduction lines through the casthouse, inability to model the equipment availabilities and capacities. This
particularly for multi-product casting operations. These gains will limitation of MRP when extrapolated outside its region of applicability
come from work flow improvements as well as melt loss is well known [4] and to help remedy these issues, finite resource
minimization, pot line superheat re-use, product quality scheduling (FRS) systems are being designed and developed
enhancements and stock holding reductions. which is the focus of this article.
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INPUTS OUTPUTS 750C. Thus there is considerable superheat available for melting
Provisional Pots Final Pots
Tapping Schedule Tapping Schedule
of scrap or alloying elements providing that the metal can be
P F
C
Pot
O
Q
L
A
u
R
A
Pots Allocated loaded into the furnaces quickly.
S
L D N to Ladles
Assays I L
E
A
Q
E
Melt loss minimization - Hot metal is subject to oxidation resulting
N C
R Ladles Allocated
Pot E
S
S E
S
S to Furnaces in a melt loss. Minimizing the time from pot tapping to casting will
Weights
Furnaces Allocated reduce the exposure time of the hot metal and hence minimize the
scrap
Casthouse Scheduling
to Casters
melt loss.
Assays
Casters Allocated
Constraints Optimization to Orders Optimization of High and Low purity hot metal from the Pot
scrap • Maintenance • • Minimum costs
Weights Tapping Routes •
Correct assays Furnace Scrap lines - Metal in the pots can become contaminated with iron or
• Personnel • Minimize blend Allocations
Alloy Materials
• etc. time other impurities, limiting its use to low quality alloys. Whereas, high
Furnaces Alloy
Allocations purity metal can be sold at a premium. The use of high purity metal
for low quality alloys essentially results in the smelter 'giving away'
PLANNING potential revenue. Optimized scheduling will ensure that there is
Casting Orders the minimum 'give away' by allocating scheduling orders to
customers
12 Weeks
Other
maximize the use of the high purity metal.
Orders rolling
schedule
Maximize use of cast house capacity - In large complex cast
Figure 1. Planning and Schematic Schematic house furnaces may be maintained at temperature, with an
associated energy cost, to provide a safety buffer. Optimal
The plan examines the orders that are required to be fulfilled and scheduling will facilitate a reduction in this safety buffer minimizing
assigns them to suitable time buckets such as monthly or weekly. energy costs.
This should account for generalized operational, material and Optimize pot tapping operations - There is flexibility in pot
equipment constraints to provide a feasible plan. The feasible plan tapping operations which if correctly utilized can maximize the
is then converted by scheduling to produce a time sequenced set production of high purity metal.
of operational requirements for sizing, assignment, sequencing Maximize use of metal transportation facilities - Optimal
and timing within a specified time horizon such as daily. The scheduling will minimize transportation delays by ensuring that the
resultant schedule being operational tasks to be commenced and processes are ready for receipt of the metal and similarly that pot
completed at specified times. tapping is able to proceed as scheduled
Scheduling Requirements These are just some examples of the anticipated benefit areas.
The pot lines are a continuous process that makes hot metal of Total benefits from optimized scheduling can exceed millions of
varying quality (generally iron contamination) which must be dollars per annum.
utilized. However there are a number of batch processes (pot
tapping, ladle transport, furnace mixing and casting) that need to The Solution
be co-ordinated in order to make use of this metal. From a
scheduling perspective it is necessary to ensure that all the The scheduling requirements can be represented schematically as
equipment is available to make use of the metal being produced in figure 2.
by the pots and minimizing the delays associated with using the Individual
CellMetal
hot metal (logistics). Further the potential value of the metal being
produced by the pots should be maximized (quality). That is Pot Tapping
ensuring that high quality metal is used for alloy types that require Optimization
most operations rely on a schedule that works which is doubtless Figure 2. Scheduling Requirements Representation
somewhat far from an optimized schedule.
The whole process being very iterative, however it is possible to
The Benefits
break this down into three main areas: Metal supply scheduling -
Generate a pot tapping schedule outlining when and where to tap
The achievement of a schedule that works is a noble aim however
High Purity (HP) and Normal Purity (NP) ladles from the pot lines
there are significant benefits that could be achieved through to be supplied to Cast-houses. Pot tapping optimization - Consider
optimizing the schedule. That is through reworking the schedule to all the pots to be tapped during a shift and identify groups for
maximize the revenue (or minimize the costs) associated with this tapping that result in all the cells being used to produce HP and
section of the smelter. There are a number of areas with the
NP hot metal while maximising the amount of HP hot metal. Cast
potential for significant benefits, these include: house scheduling - Coordinating operations of the furnaces and
the casters to fill casting orders, this is the basis of the illustrative
Maximize use of superheated pots - Hot metal tapped from the example.
pots is around 950C, while casting temperatures should be around
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1-Caster
Introduction 3-Furnaces
AlloyGroup1Size1
AlloyGroup3
Problems involving both quantity and logic variables and
constraints are what are called production logistics problems. It WashCast
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horizon. The release-date specifies the earliest time that the equal to the lower hold-up size. The holding time is enforced
production can consume the hot-metal and the due-date specifies through a logic constraint known as the lower and upper fill-draw
the last date when it is available. Production can flow-in hot delay. The lower bound is a time in hours (or relative-time) which
metal quantities over the release and due-date whenever required upon the last fill into the furnace it will not allow draws out. The
and must not exceed the upper bound and it must use no less upper limit is useful for perishable stocks for example whereby
than the lower bound. The flowrate at which it can receive or be there must be a draw sometime before the upper bound.
delivered hot-metal is specified by a hydraulic capacity on the That said, there can be a need to specify an upper fill-draw-delay
outlet-port of the perimeter. There are three perimeter-outlet-port given the heat energy requirements necessary to keep the
production objects shown in Figure 3 with the third one (unlabeled) aluminum molten. There can also be a draw-draw-delay which for
being a dummy or hypothetical supply source for a zero amount of multiple drops to a caster from one furnace can be used to apply
WashCast material to be further explained in the immediate an additional hold-time between drops.
subsection to follow. There can also be a supply of scrap metal
generated by cleaning (repetitive), preventive and corrective The WashCast operation for each furnace is the cleaning or
maintenance activities etc. which can be fed in when required and repetitive maintenance operation of the furnace whenever an alloy-
would need another perimeter-outlet-port object to be configured group switch-over occurs. The operating rules or procedures
in the model. around this are important to describe in a little more resolution. If
a particular furnace-unit currently in operation AlloyGroup2 is
Re-Melt/Holding Furnaces (Pools) required to switch to AlloyGroup1 due to a near term demand-
As shown in Figure 3, there are three physical furnaces modeled order of an alloy-grade made from hot-metal produced when the
as pool-units each having four operations of AlloyGroup1, furnace is operating AlloyGroup1, a WashCast operation must be
AlloyGroup2, AlloyGroup3 and WashCast. The furnace is modeled initiated to remove the heel of hot-metal before the AlloyGroup1
as a pool given that it can accumulate hot-metal, at least in the can be started-up. This is accomplished by imposing a special
short-term, with any remaining inventory labeled as a heel. logic constraint called start-up-when-empty that says that an alloy-
The furnace has three sub-operations called filling, holding and group operation cannot start-up unless the hold-up in the furnace
drawing. The filling sub-operation or operative describes the is zero tonnes (note that this is usually below the operating lower
furnace when it is being charged or allowing flow-in with either low bound on the furnace). Equally well, there is a shut-down-when-
or high-purity hot-metal depending on the unit-operation selected. empty for the WashCast operation which says that upon shut-down
When filling, a draw to the downstream caster cannot occur and of the WashCast operation the inventory in the furnace must be
visa-versa. The drawing or dropping operation describes the zero or some user-entered quantity. The washings of hot-metal
furnace when it allows flow-out to the caster. The holding operative must be disposed of somehow and this is via a WashCast operation
lies in-between the filling and drawing sub operations and provides on the caster also shown in Figure 3.
enough delay to add the component stock alloying materials (such
as magnesium) within pre-specified recipe amounts or proportions
conditional on the heel and hot metal supply qualities. It also Direct-Chilled Caster (Both Continuous and Batch-Processes)
allows enough time for the component stock alloys to mix and The casting operation is modeled as an upstream continuous
stabilize inside the furnace as well as re-melting any scrap process of receiving the hot-metal alloy from the furnaces (though
additions. only one furnace can feed one caster at a time) and multiple batch
processes representing the mold sizes of the cast logs being
The four operations mentioned, except for the WashCast, are produced as shown in Figure 3. The seven bolded rectangles are
aggregated or grouped alloy-grade classifications. Although the the batch-process unit operations. It is possible to model the caster
casthouse can produce hundreds of different individual alloy without breaking it into two types of processes but this incurs more
grades from each furnace, due to optimization of solvency issues, binary or logic variables in the model than the approach taken
grades are strategically set into groups or families whereby grades here. Most casters are of the direct-chilled type which implies a
within a group have similar start-up, shut-down and switch-over certain controlled procedure for cooling and forming the hot-metal
event logic requirements [ 8]. This is not to say that alloy-grades alloy in logs of varying geometry and size where the log length
within an alloy-group do not have important sequence-dependent can also be a variable. After the caster, there can be a
change-over requirements that need to be respected, only that homogenization or treating operation and then a sawing operation
from the perspective of our production logistics decision-making of producing log lengths according to a specific customer order.
filling, holding and drawing a furnace with the appropriate quantity Scrap or trim-loss after sawing is stock-piled and is recycled back
(and quality) of hot-metal, the switch-over details are relegated to as scrap to the re-melt furnaces to be re-injected and cast into a
a post-optimization or secondary decision-support tool. salable product sometime into the future.
The system presented in Figure 3 has only two sizes of cast each
In order to model the filling, holding and drawing sub-operations, with varying amounts of hot-metal requirements. This implies that
special logic constraints are required and are attached to the pool each size has its own batch-size upper and lower quantity
unit-operation object. The first is called the fill-to-full quantity specifications. A typical cycle-time for a caster is between 2 to 4-
restriction which will disallow drawing or flow-out of the furnace hours and this is modeled as a simple time-delay between the
until the furnace inventory is above the fill-to-full quantity filling and drawing of aluminum. The batch-process is modeled
specification somewhere in between the lower and upper furnace with a start-to-fill-delay and start-to-draw-delay in relative time from
capacity but closer to the upper capacity limit. Symmetrically there the start-up of the batch operation. This tells the logistics scheduling
is also a draw-to-empty quantity which will not allow hot metal fills optimizer when to flow-in feed material and when to flow-out
until the accumulation in the furnace is below a certain amount product material during the operation of the batch.
typically set below the fill-to-full quantity and above or Another salient side logic constraint associated with the caster and
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its variable sizes is the operation-group shut-down lower (and splitting in some cases can be at the back-end of the casthouse,
upper) down-time. When there is a caster size change from say however when production-order merging or splitting is required
size 150mm to 300mm the caster must be forced into a down-time through-out the different production levels or stages upstream in
in order to properly set-up or re-tool the unit. This is implemented the casthouses, this can be a difficult and time-consuming task
as a sequence-independent change-over [9, 10]. In this model to relegate to the user. The consequences are to back-log orders
there are two sizes and two operation-groups called Size1 and and/or to cut-corners in terms of operating policy ultimately
Size2. Whenever any unit-operation in Size1 shuts down and conceding quality.
then afterward a unit-operation in Size2 starts-up sometime in
the immediate future a down-time delay is invoked on the Illustrative Example
physical unit of relative-time specified by the user. The small but representative casthouse scheduling problem
Typically sequence-independent down-times for casters are on found in Figure 4 is used as the illustrative example. All furnaces
the order of 2 to 8-hours depending on the mold size and in all operations have a lower bound hold-up size of 4-metric
available re-tooling facilities. It should be mentioned that this tons and an upper limit of 70. For the sake of clarity, the
logic constraint is very similar to the fill-draw-delay where a fill WashCast operations on each furnace are disallowed over the
sub operation relates to the operation in a particular group and 27-hour scheduling time-horizon. The time-period duration is 0.5-
the draw sub-operation relates to any operation not within the group. hours yielding 54 time-periods in total. The opening inventories
of each furnace are 4-metric tons and the fill-to-full quantity is
Demand of Aluminum Alloy-Grades (Inlet-Port-Perimeter) 40-metric tons with a draw-to-empty quantity of 10. The semi-
After the caster there can be other downstream operations. In continuous flow rate (ie, zero is also a lower bound if not flowing)
order to balance the scope, complexity and accuracy of the at which high or low-purity hot-metal can charge the furnaces is
production model with its tractability (ie, its likelihood of solving 30 to 50- metric tons per half-hour and the three furnaces can
in reasonable time), it is assumed that there are no capacity be fed simultaneously where there is a hold-time of 2-hours after
bottlenecks with the homogenization and sawing unit operations. the last fill in each furnace for the hold or steep-time to add the
As such, a fixed delay or offset to the demand-order release and component stocks. The continuous-process part of the caster
due-dates is assumed. This will allow enough time between can only receive hot-metal from one furnace at a time and this
casting and lay-down in the stock-pile area to meet the customers is imposed as a single-use logic constraint on the inlet port. The
due-date as a proxy type constraint ie, an approximate or batch-process part of the furnace, which represents the size of
substitute to the complexity of adding the homogenization and the cast log (no particular geometry is selected in this example),
sawing unit-operations. has a cycle-time of 3-hours with an operation-group shut-down
time of 6- hours for each caster size irrespective of the alloy-
Upon solution of the problem, the results of the optimization will group stock. Its batch size is 40.4-metric tons for Size1 and 48.6-
provide an optimized schedule which has properly accounted metric tons for Size2. The yields on the outlet ports of the batch
for hot-metal supply and demand quantity balances and process processes are 0.93812 for Size1 and 0.94856 for Size2 yielding
and operating procedure logic balances. This means that the product stock batch-sizes of 37.9 and 46.1-metric tons
proper sizing, assignment, sequencing and timing of non- respectively. It is assumed that low and high-purity hot-metal is
renewable and renewable resources has been performed always available and the due-dates for all six product stocks are
subject to the production logistics constraints of the system. It the end-of-scheduling time-horizon (ie, 27-hours); the release-
also implies that for any sequence of alloy-grade, which satisfies dates are the start-of-schedule.
its demand-order release and due-date, the schedule is feasible
(not optimal) for quantity and logic except for any instance The solve time for this example is 10-seconds on a Pentium IV
where a sequence dependent maintenance-operation is required 1.7 MHz laptop running Xpress-MILP from Dash Optimization
for a grade-to-grade switch-over (or cost) is invoked and an un- Inc. running standard branch-and-bound using all default settings.
modeled or relaxed constraint is violated. Fortunately, if there is There are approximately 500 binary variables, 2,200 constraints
enough renewable and non-renewable resource slack in the 1,400 continuous variables after pre-processing of the linear
system given the supply and demand-orders (ie, bottlenecks or programming (LP) matrix. When larger problem instances are
critical equipment and stock resources are special cases) then solved with more furnaces, casters and alloy-groups, engineered
using proxy'd capacity details such as increasing the operation- heuristics can be used [11] to decrease the solve times at the
group shut-down time to that of the maximum sequence- expense of perhaps less optimal solutions. There is no objective
dependent transition time will enable useful solutions to be function specified for this problem other than finding a feasible
generated that can be easily implemented. solution without violation of any of the constraints and which
satisfies all demand-order quantities sometime within the horizon.
Finally, the aspects of make-to-stock and make-order production Theoretically the minimum makespan (minimum completion
can be easily accommodated in this approach. For example, if time) to produce all six product stocks is 26.5-hours.
one large demand-order for an alloy-grade found in AlloyGroup2
is required, of which several furnaces and casters can produce Figure 4 shows the profile of the three furnaces over the 27-hour
it, the closed-shop scheduling system may allocate parts of the time-horizon with the hold-up quantities shown on the y-axis. As
order to certain individual equipment within the given casthouse is evident, Furnace3 is set-up in AlloyGroup3 and is dropped
their availability and capacity attributes in an opportunistic first to the caster but is filled after the other furnaces. Then, after
fashion. An open-shop scheduling system would require the 3- hours Furnace2 is dropped then Furnace1 in that order. Each
order to be split manually by the user or it may be pre-allocated furnace does two fills and two drops given the demand-order
by the planning system. If the split is not appropriate then the requirements of six product stocks to produce one for each
system will show infeasibilities and some other split would need alloy group and size.
to be decided by the user or the plan must be re-run. This merging and
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Conclusion
70
65
60
55
50
Presented in this article are several facets of scheduling the
45
40
relatively complex production found in aluminum smelter
35
30 casthouses. This is a closed-shop scheduling optimization problem
25
20 which involves both quantity and logic details and is solved as
15
10 such using state-of-the-art mixed-integer linear programming
5
0 software and a sophisticated mathematical programming modeling
0.0-h 1.5-h 3-h 4.5-h 6-h 7.5-h 9-h 10.5-h 12-h13.5-h 15-h16.5-h 18-h19.5-h 21-h
22.5-h 24-h25.5-h 27-h
and formulation approach. In a production environment there can
be considerable benefits from optimizing the scheduling of
Time (Hours) casthouse operations. A small but representative illustrative
Furnace1-"AlloyGroup1" Furnace2-"AlloyGroup2"
example is provided which demonstrates some of the important
Furnace3-"AlloyGroup3" features of the problem and its solution.
Figure 4. Furnace profiles.
Finally, it should be strongly pointed out that it is always possible
Figure 5 displays the caster profile over the same 27-hours for the
to model the major (and minor) production details of any process
batch-process (Caster12) representing the mold size station.
industrial plant (or enterprise) using the concepts described. The
Operation-group Size2 is produced first and then Size1. There is
perpetual problem is being able to solve the problem in reasonable
a 6-hour time-delay before Size1 operation-group can start-up
time so that more profitable and useful solutions are found which
given the down-time restriction when changing molds in the caster are more and more accurate.
to achieve different sizes. As is obvious in the scheduling results,
there is a large degree of ambiguity from the perspective of the References
unit-operation assignments and sequencing. For example,
operation-group Size1 could have easily been scheduled first on
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0.0-h 1.5-h 3-h 4.5-h 10.5-h 12-h13.5-h 15-h16.5-h 18-h19.5-h 21-h22.5-h 24-h25.5-h 27-h
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Figure 5. Caster12 (batch-process) profile
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