The steel industry is facing profound transformation processes characterised by increasing pressure to decarbonise, digitalise and improve resource efficiency. Against this backdrop, efficient production planning is becoming increasingly important in order to sustainably combine economic objectives with ecological requirements.
Optimisation models are a key tool in production planning. Production planning covers a wide range of areas, such as demand and capacity planning, sequence and batch size planning, and energy and raw material usage planning. Existing optimisation approaches range from linear models to mixed-integer models. Stochastic models are also increasingly being used to systematically take uncertainties – such as fluctuating raw material availability or demand – into account and enable more robust planning strategies.
The aim of the work is to systematically record existing optimisation approaches and structure them in terms of characteristics such as static or dynamic modelling, consideration of one or more production processes, type of objective function, etc. for the transformation processes in the steel industry. The approaches will then be evaluated in terms of their data requirements and their potential to actively support industrial transformation. Knowledge of operations research is an advantage for working on this topic.
If you are interested, please contact Leonard Dietz