Slab Matching Problem Regarding Material Flow And Order Due Dates

Customer order decoupling point plays a very important role in material flow through the supply chains. In this point, materials are assigned to customer orders. Material allocation problem in customer order decouplingpoint has gained increasing attention in recent years. According to the literature, the most popular decoupling point in the steel industry is located at the slab stock yard. This paper studies thiswidespread material allocation problem in the steelindustry in which steel slabs are assigned to customer orders. For the first time, material flow targets gained from the aggregate planning module, order due-dates, and slab mismatchingpenalties are considered simultaneously. An integer programming formulation (IP for short) is developed for the problem. Because of large dimensionality of the real world problems in thesteel industry, general optimization algorithms (like branch and bound) cannot solve the IP problem in a reasonable time. So, a minimum cost flow network formulation is developed for theproblem. Hence, the problem can be solved inpolynomial time with any of the existing algorithms for the minimum cost flow problem. This is of significant importance, since the slab matching problem is performed typically daily. Hence, therunning time of the algorithm should be around a few minutes.

کلیدواژه ها:

steel slab matching ، material flow ، polynomial formulation ، minimum cost flow