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Robotics Autom., 2007, pp. 660–667. Color-Coating Production Scheduling for Coils in Inventory in Steel Industry Lixin Tang, Xianpeng Wang, and Jiyin Liu Abstract—This paper studies a large-scale scheduling problem in iron and steel industry, called Color-Coating Production Scheduling for Coils in Inventory (CCPSCI). The problem is to select steel coils from those in the coil yard and to create a production schedule so that the productivity and product quality are maximized, while the production cost and other penalties are minimized. A tabu search (TS) algorithm is proposed for this problem. Results on real production instances show that the proposed method is much more effective and efficient than manual scheduling. Note to Practitioners—Combining the proposed mathematical model and the TS heuristic with man-machine interactive method, a practical color- coating production scheduling system for coils in inventory has been devel- oped and implemented in Shanghai Baoshan Iron and Steel Company, Ltd. Since many scheduling problems in the steel industry such as the hot rolling production scheduling problem share many similarities with the CCPSCI, the mathematical model and the TS heuristic proposed in this paper may be extended to be applied in such problems. Index Terms—Color-coating scheduling, Tabu search. I. INTRODUCTION Planning and scheduling problems in the iron and steel industry are important research topics and have drawn the attention of many pro- duction and operations management researchers recently. A review on planning and scheduling methods and systems for integrated steel pro- duction was given in [1]. However, most research on this subject is focused on the hot rolling production. Reference [2] studied a primary production scheduling problem in- cluding continuous caster and hot strip mill (HSM). They proposed two methods for caster scheduling and a third method for integrated caster and HSM scheduling, respectively. Reference [3] considered the steel-making scheduling problem as a hybrid flowshop problem and proposed a heuristic combining Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. Reference [4] reduced the hot rolling production sched- uling problem to a knapsack constrained problem and presented a prize collecting traveling salesman problem (PCTSP) model. Reference [5] described the HSM production scheduling problem, formulated it as a generalization of PCTSP, and proposed a tabu search (TS) heuristic to obtain good solutions. Reference [6] proposed a multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP) model for the hot rolling production sched- uling problem using a parallel strategy. To solve the problem, they first converted the MTSP into a single TSP model, and then constructed Manuscript received September 13, 2006; revised May 15, 2007 and September 14, 2007. This paper was recommended for publication by As- sociate Editor X. Xie and Editor N. Viswanadham upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported in part Shanghai Baoshan Iron and Steel Company, Ltd., on the Color-Coating Production Scheduling Research under Grant 2004Z146BZ, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China under Grant 70425003, in part by the National 863 High-Tech Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2006AA04Z174, and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60674084. L. Tang and X. Wang are with the Logistics Institute, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110004, China (e-mail: lixintang@mail.neu.edu.cn; wangxianpeng @ise.neu.edu.cn). J. Liu was with the Business School, Loughborough University, Leicester- shire LE11 3TU, U.K. (e-mail: j.y.liu@lboro.ac.uk). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASE.2008.918126 1545-5955/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE