DTAI

On Friday 29 October 2010, at 15h, in room A05.128:

Guido Tack will give a seminar on

Constraint-Based Scheduling for Steel Production


Abstract:
Modern steel plants are highly integrated factories, producing many different types of steel, often in a just-in-time fashion (i.e., producing for customer demand, not for stock).  The processes in these factories require careful scheduling in order to meet deadlines, maintain a high product quality, and keep the machines busy.

Guido Tack is working in a project with PSI Metals, a Brussels-based company that provides software solutions for the steel industry.  In this talk, he will give an overview of the processes involved in steel production, and then describe two scheduling problems that arise from these processes and that we currently try to tackle. He will present constraint-based scheduling, a technique that has proven successful for solving hard short-term scheduling problems, and show how thistechnique can be applied here.