Simultaneous Optimization of Charging Scheduling and Heating Control in Reheating Furnace

Abstract

This paper discusses a slab reheating furnace control problem for a hot strip mill, where permutation scheduling of slabs charged into a furnace and temperature control of slabs inside a furnace are simultaneously optimized in the conveyor-type model. The problem is solved within the framework of hybrid systems theory, in particular, model predictive control based on mixed logical dynamical model representation. We propose a novel modeling scheme of this process, which makes the computation time for deriving the solution remarkably smaller than the case of the usual modeling.