Continuous Casting Scheduling with Constraint Programming.

Although the Steel Mill Slab problem (prob 38 of CSPLib) has already been studied by the CP community, this approach is unfor- tunately not used anymore by steel producers since last century. Continuous casting is preferred instead, allowing higher throughput and better steel quality. This paper presents a CP model related to scheduling of op- erations for steel making with continuous casting. Activities considered range from the extraction of iron in the furnace to its casting in con- tinuous casters. We describe the problem, detail a CP scheduling model that is finally used to solve real-life instances of some of the PSI Metals’ customers.