Integrated CBR Framework for Quality Designing and Scheduling in Steel Industry

In the steel industry, quality designing is related to the determination of mechanical properties of the final products and operational conditions according to the specifications that a customer requests. It involves the utilization of metallurgical knowledge and field experience in the industry. On the other hand, the production scheduling for steel making is a large-scale, multi-objective, grouping and sequencing problem with various restrictions. Traditionally, these two problems have been handled separately. However, the rapid development of information techniques has enabled the simultaneous solution of these two problems. In this paper, we develop an integrated case based reasoning framework for quality designing and scheduling. As proposed, the case base is established with proper case representation scheme, similar cases are retrieved and selected using fuzzy techniques, and finally the selected cases are put into the production process using the scheduling technique. The experimental results show good performance to the quality designing and scheduling of steel products. The framework developed is expected to be applied to other process industries.

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