The Research Of The System Of Steel-making-Casting-Hot-rolling Based On Multi-Agent Scheduling

Steel-making - Casting - hot-rolling are the three major processes in the iron and steel enterprises. The coordination among them to the process of productivity, energy saving and product quality. Thus they must be smooth and consistent. Operations research and artificial intelligence are the commonly methods used in the metallurgical enterprise planning and scheduling systems. With the improvement of integration of the three core processes, the methods of Multi-agent were applied widely. Cowling, Petrovic and Tang Lixin had done some research in the field.A slab production line of refining-Continuous Casting was built on the basis of the original CSP production line in the factory B. The CSP caster is able to group twenty-five heats in a casting plan on average, and the slab production line is ten furnaces in a casting plan. So it was very complex to schedule molten steel for the two lines which shared the two converters's produce at the same time. A model of Steel-making - Casting was successfully established in the paper. The model had been converted from mixed integral program problem to linear program problem. It was solved iteratively by using MATLAB procedures.The communication procedures of the multi-agent were realized using VC languages. The XML documents were generated and modified by attaching the class of CMarkup in the communication procedures. The connections between algorithms procedures and communication procedures of the Model were also realized by using VC.The following conclusions can be drawn from the above research: (1) the optimal Goals of the "continuousity" and "proportionality" and "rhythm", on the one hand , met the requirements of the furnace plan casting continuously, the balance of the machines load and the pace of the process of producing in the metallurgical enterprise planning and scheduling systems. On the other hand, reduced the complexity of the model.(2)The mixed-integer linear programming problems were changed into liner program by giving the initial values of the integer variables and, reduced the complexity of solving and met the requirement of speed for on-line and real time control. After getting the initial results, tune the integer variables literally to ensure the accuracy of the calculations.(3)The communication between the agents based on TCP / IP Socket's and XML format of data is easy to read, analysis, modify.