Assessing feasibility of design constraints for mills in planning and scheduling of cold rolling: A case of steel industry

In the ongoing scenario of Industry 4.0 and automation, every enterprise needs to look forward to digitalizing its ongoing production planning and scheduling methods by employing different platforms available in the market. In early industrialized nations, the transition to the 4th stage of industrialization is now influencing how industrial value is created. The study is focused on India’s stainless steel manufacturing sector. The area of attention is the digitization of continuous planning and scheduling utilizing an automated model as opposed to a continuous system of planning which requires a significant amount of human labor. Consequently, information and technology are used to manage processes and quality. The research article discusses a problem with coil routing in cold rolling and proposes a solution using a multi-criteria decision-making technique called Measurement of Alternatives and Ranking according to COmpromise Solution (MARCOS). The selection criteria considered economic, social, and environmental factors, and the research focuses on planning feasible routing options by considering constraints associated with cold rolling mills. The issue with the current routing process, which is determined by an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, is that it does not consider any mill-specific constraints and schedules all orders to the first mill by default, resulting in manual planning. The proposed solution involves creating a real-time data model that can consider the constraints associated with each mill, thus enabling automated routing and optimizing the process. This study focuses on addressing the routing problem in the steel industry, which considers the design constraints associated with various mills. To accomplish this, a multi-criteria decision-making model is employed, which considers the rolled coil’s thickness, grade, and width as design criteria while also comparing mill-related restrictions. As a result, the model generates potential rolling alternatives for the coil. This approach contributes to sustainable steel production by reducing product quality deviations and minimizing the reliance on human planning, thereby promoting automation in the steel industry. Considering the limitations imposed by mills, a workable routing alternative is presented in this paper with the aid of information and technology. It will reduce the steel industry’s reliance on human scheduling. This model is a first step towards rationalizing the scheduling and planning of a product like steel, which has quite a few characteristics.