A STEEL COIL MERGING METHOD BASED ON PARTHENO-GENETIC ALGORITHM

AND ITS APPLICATION

Jun Zhao, Wei Wang, Quanli Liu, Wei Ju

Research Center of Information and Control, Dalian University of Technology,

Dalian 116024, P. R. China (wangwei@dlut.edu.cn)

Abstract: The effectiveness of steel coil merging in cold rolling production makes a
great influence on the efficiency of whole rolling line. This optimized process is
considered as a complicated combinatorial problem that can hardly be solved with
general mathematic programming because of its complexity. A steel coil merging
model is established and a modified partheno-genetic algorithm to solve this model is
proposed in this paper. The experiments with real production data show that the
presented model and algorithm improve the merging ratio effectively and enhance the
intelligent level of cold rolling production planning. The software system based on
this method has been successfully applied to a cold rolling plant of Shanghai Baosteel
for about one year. Copyright © 2007 IFAC

Keywords: cold rolling production; steel coil merging; combinatorial optimization;

partheno-genetic algorithm

1. INTRODUCTION tandem cold rolling line contains complex production

The production procedures in cold rolling plant, such
as cold rolling, annealing, galvanizing, and so forth,
are the significant processes that can heighten the
additional values of steel products. Under the
condition of market economy, the production in steel
manufacturing industry is an order-oriented mode,
which needs to adjust the production plan in time
according to the requirements of customers and some
other uncontrollable factors. Therefore, the efficiency
of production planning and scheduling in cold rolling
plant is very crucial to elevate the profit of modern
steel manufacturing enterprises. As the most
important upstream equipment in cold rolling plant,
planning questions, which are usually multi-objective
and multi-constraint optimizations, even NP-hard
problems. It means that the solution space expands
rapidly with the increase of the parameter scale, and it
is very difficult for the planners to obtain the
satisfactory optimized solution with general
mathematic programming or operational research
method.
To the study of production planning and scheduling in
steel industry, some scholars in this field have
engaged in both theory and application for a long
time, especially with evolutionary search algorithms.
Wang, et al. (2004) constructed an adaptive genetic
algorithm (GA) to apply to the automatic coils piling
process of bell-type annealing furnace in cold rolling
plant, and a well running result is presented. Tang, et
al. (2000) built a hot rolling planning model that
searched the minimal penalty of adjacent slab jumps
of width, gauge and hardness with a modified GA.
The practical application shown that proposed
approach improved over 20% in comparison with the
manual operations by workers. Lopez, et al. (1998)
formulated hot rolling scheduling problem as a
mathematical program and proposed a heuristic
algorithm based on Tabu Search (TS) for the good
feasible solution. That method was successfully
applied to Dofasco, Canada’s largest steel producer.
All of above-mentioned applications demonstrate the
advantages of intelligent search algorithm to solve the
production scheduling problem in steel industry. On
the other hand, research on cold rolling production in
recent literatures chiefly focused on optimizing the
parameters of tandem cold rolling mill, such as roller
torque, tension and rolling power, which is to
improve the production capability and to reduce the
setup costs (Wang, et al. 2000). However, few papers
concentrated on the cold rolling production planning
problems due to the diversity of practical production
environments and constraints.
Considering the practical situation of a cold rolling
plant of Shanghai Baosteel Co. Ltd. in China, a
modified partheno-genetic algorithm is presented to
solve the steel coil merging problem in this paper,
Fig.1. The production flow in the cold rolling plant
with which the global searching ability is improved
and the convergent speed is guaranteed. In addition,
an intelligent steel coil merging system based on the
proposed approach is developed and applied to this
plant. The practical application with about one year
has indicated that the running system is reliable and
effective.
2. MATHEMATIC MODEL
2.1 Problem description
The manufacturing process of cold rolling thin strip is
fairly complicated, and its production materials are
mainly the hot rolling coils produced by hot rolling,
whose gauge ranges from 1.5 to 6 mm. The hot coils
are opened and handled by the picking line before
rolling for clearing away the ferric oxides on steel
surface. Then, they are rolled by tandem cold rolling
mill to produce thin strip steel below 1.0mm. In
general, most of the procedure lines of the cold
rolling plant generate the outputs for not only the next
procedure, but also the sales market as the ultimate
products. As the most primary equipment, cold
rolling line has the largest production capacity in cold
rolling plant, which provides downstream lines with a
great number of materials. Therefore, its efficiency
makes an intensive influence on the other
manufacturing lines of the whole plant. Fig.1 gives
the detailed process flow situation in the cold rolling
thin strip plant of Baosteel.
Since the bell-type annealing line, the heat treatment width ranges
procedure, is the bottleneck of this plant; meanwhile, Sequence Width (mm) Maximal Weight (T)
the coil-charging amount in each bell-type furnace is 1 <730 12.240
invariable, the efficiency of this procedure line could 2 730~739 12.410
be advanced only through increasing the single coil 3 740~769 12.580
weight. Nevertheless, the weight of single hot rolling 4 780~799 13.090
coil is relatively small. Thus, we perform the coil 5 800~819 13.600
merging operation in the cold rolling line, which 6 820~843 13.940
serves to ensure a high production capacity of the 7 844~854 14.280
downstream annealing line. Previously, scheduling 8 855~869 14.535
workers executed the coil merging operation with the 9 870~889 14.790
manual scheduling method. Because of the large 10 890~899 15.130
number of steel coils and the various technical 11 900~919 15.300
constraints, merging operation by manual method is 12 920~949 15.640
usually time-consuming and non-optimized. 13 >=950 16.000

The objective of steel coil merging operation is to

merge the small coils into a big one. There are two
merging modes in the practical production of
Shanghai Baosteel, which are the two-one merging
mode and the three-two merging mode. The two-one
merging represents that two small coils are merged
into a big one; and the three-two merging represents
that three small steel coils are merged into two big
coils, both of which have the identical weight. To
guarantee that the steel coils in each group can be
arbitrarily merged by the two merging mode, the coils
are classified according to the width and the gauge. In
addition, technical constraints must be satisfied,
which includes:
(1) the available coils must have the same steel grade
that represents the chemical components of steel;
(2) the coils whose rolling gauge are less than
0.22mm must not be merged because it is very
difficult for the sort of coils to guarantee the
production quality of the merged strip steel.
(3) the steel coils with specific requirements must
not be merged, such as the demand of customers,
and so forth.
2.2 Steel coil merging model
We firstly complete two-one merging considering that
this planning mode make the coiling process more
tractable than the other mode. The available steel
coils are divided into several groups, each of which
consists of two coils. The merging operation is
illustrated as the Equ.(1):
1, widthi ∈ K m and weight i ≤ Z m
flag i = (1)
0, Otherwise
where flag i = 1 denotes that the ith merging group
is feasible; otherwise, the ith merging group is invalid;
width i and weight i are the width and the total
weight of the coils in ith group, respectively. Km and
Zm represent the mth width and its corresponding
maximal weight shown in Table.1, m is the sequence.
The merging effectiveness is determined by the
amount and the weight of merged coils. We formulate
a mathematic model as Equ.(2):

According to the technical constraints in production n

Min : J = ct ⋅ ( n − flag i )
practice, the relationship between the coil width and i =1 (2)
the maximal weight of single coil in the merging n
+ cv ⋅ ( weight i − Z m ) ⋅ flag i
2

process is shown as Table.1. As the description above, i =1

the optimization of steel coil merging is to form steel where J is the objective function; ct is the weight
coils as heavily as possible and without exceeding the coefficient of the feasible group number, and cv is the
limitation of the acceptable maximal weight. weight coefficient of variance of the feasible group
Table.1 The acceptable maximal weight in specific weight; n is the group number. The objective of
Equ.(2) is to maximize the number of the feasible
group and its corresponding weight under the
constraints in Table.1. As for the three-two merging
mode, it is similar to the presented mathematic model
of two-one merging as long as the grouping manner is
to involve three steel coils in each group.
3. SOLVING METHOD BASED ON PGA
In this paper, we propose a modified
Partheno-Genetic Algorithm (PGA) to solve this
combinatorial model. PGA is a special genetic
algorithm that resolves the infeasibility of
crossover between two chromosomes organized by
ordinal strings, and has been applied to some fields
(Katayama and Narihisa, 2001). Li and Tong (1999)
have substantiated the global convergence ability of
PGA. Comparing with other crossover operations
such as PMX, OX and CX (Mitsuo and Cheng, 1997),
the generation of new individual in PGA is to use
parthenogenetic operators, which means that new
generation comes from a single parent, but not a pair
of ones. Therefore, the genetic operation tends to be
simple and adaptive to industrial practice. Moreover,
the characteristic of no immature convergences in
PGA ensures the accuracy of solution.
3.1 Coding of chromosome
It is very crucial for the coding of chromosome to
guarantee the characteristic of integrality, robustness
and non-redundancy (Back, 1996). We apply the
integer coding method to this merging optimization
model. The number of the available steel coils
determines the number of genes, which means that
each gene represents one steel coil. The grouping
description is given as follow:
g i = {a 2 i −1 , a 2 i } (3)
where gi denotes the ith group; a2i-1 and a2i are the
genome involved in the group. Depending on the
Equ.(1), the variable flagi can be calculated.
3.2 Initialization and the fitness function
We randomly obtain the initial colony. The length of
the chromosome is arranged based on the amount of
steel coils. In order to maintain the generality, we
define 1000/J as the fitness function of this merging
model, where J is the value of the Equ.(2). It can
assure that the individual with higher fitness value
represents the better solution.
3.3 Generation of the new colony
PGA repeals crossover operators and defines the
parthenogenetic operators as the same function. In
this paper, we design the gene swap operator as the
chief parthenogenetic operator, associating with the
substring move operator. Here is an example:
Operator of gene swap:
Sequence number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Parent: 5734126
Child: 5234176
Operator of substring move:
Substring: 345
Parent: 1234567
Child: 1267345
After creating the new individuals on the same scale,
the tournament selection is applied to establish the
new generation.
3.4 Solving steps
Step1. Gather a certain kind of available steel coils
that can be grouped freely, and calculate the amount
for specifying the length of chromosome. Then,
initialize the colony; obtain the initial fitness value of
each individual.
Step2. Generate the new individual with the proposed
parthenogenetic operators, and select the superior
ones for the next generation. Get the best so far
solution.
Step3. Check weather the termination criterion is
satisfied. If so, go forward to the Step4; otherwise,
repeat the Step2 for the better solution. the grouping result is as follows:
g1= {5#, 7#}, flag1=1;
Step4. Check whether all of the available coils are g2= {1#, 8#}, flag2=1;
handled. If so, the solving is completed; otherwise, g3= {2#, 9#}, flag3=0;
gather another kind of available steel coils and go g4= {4#, 3#}, flag4=1;
back to repeat the Step1. g5= {0#, 6#}, flag5=0.

In the practical experiments, we designate that the

4. SIMULATION EXAMPLE AND SYSTEM values of parameter ct and cv are 0.9 and 0.1,
APPLICATION respectively. Therefore, the variable J is 2.95
according to the Equ.(2), and the value of fitness
Firstly, we present a computational example to function is 338.98.
illustrate the proposed optimization method. Table.2
gives the information of a certain sort of steel coils, Based on the proposed optimization approach, we
whose rolling width is 880mm. In other words, if the develop an intelligent coil merging system on
steel coils can be merged, then the weight of the Microsoft .NET platform, whose kernel algorithm is
formed new steel coil must be less than 14.79 tons implemented by C++ language and the graphic user
according to the constraints in Table.1. interface (GUI) is developed with Visual C#. In the
algorithm, the probability of gene swapping and
Table.2 Information of steel coils in the example substring moving in PGA are respectively specified as
0.85 and 0.15. The scale of colony is 200; the
Coil No. Weight (T) Gene maximal iteration number is 50. The running
5645900000 6.855 1# environment on the server computer is 3.0GHz CPU
5649670000 9.830 2# and 512M memory. With such planning system, the
5649510000 6.283 3# scheduling workers can freely select the steel coils
5647360000 6.335 4# that need to be merged, and assign the merging rules
5649470000 6.333 5# based on the production practice. And also, the
5641840000 6.515 6# automatic planning results can be rectified with the
5641851000 6.375 7# friendly human-machine coordination interface,
5649771000 6.418 8# which improves the flexibility of coil merging
5649610000 7.208 9# operation. Table.3 presents a result comparison with
5647500000 8.545 0# real production data between the planning system and
the manual operation of workers in the plant, in which
Assuming that a certain chromosome is 5718294306, 240 available steel coils are involved.

Table.3 Comparison between the proposed method and the manual operation by workers

Number Number of Number of Merging Computing

Method
of coils Two-one Merging Three-two Merging ratio Time
Proposed method 240 98 129 94.6% 134 (second)
Manual Operation 240 76 (average) 114 (average) 79.2% 3~5 (hours)
contrast, even if adding the data importing and other
From the Table.3, we can see that the merging ratio accessorial operations, the sum of the running time by
using the optimized approach increases by more than the proposed PGA is less than 5 minutes. As for the
15% compared with that using the operation by merging effectiveness, the sum of weight variance of
workers. In the terms of computing time, the manual the merged coils is only 106.5 in such number of steel
operation needs much more time period to coils. This consequence illustrates that the weight of
accomplish the batch of manufacturing plan. In formed new coils is very close to the acceptable
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