You are here: » Solutions » SteelPlanner APS
SteelPlanner APS
Traditionally, production planning in the steel industry is organized as a hierarchic decision making procedure, going from yearly strategic product planning, capacity planning, order planning to daily line scheduling. Detailed daily line scheduling is the last step in this process and we observe that too often this purely top down approach results in infeasible situations at this level. This leads to many local optima versus one global optimum.
For industries that have the level of complexity of the steel industry, the above considerations lead to the definition of an additional layer in the general functional architecture of a production planning solution: an integrated "Advanced Planning and Scheduling" solution. This level will handle the synchronization of complex production facilities respecting both global sales and operational planning goals and local equipment specific scheduling rules.
SteelPlanner APS product suite has been developped in this purpose. The main objective of the APS modules is to optimize particular processes or sub-processes taking into consideration the upstream and downstream constraints. The vertical integration from Sales & Operation Planning to Detailed scheduling and the horizontal integration from Steel making to shipment is inherent to SteelPlanner APS.
SteelPlanner APS is composed of the following modules:
- SPS - Forecaster
- SPS - SalesPlanner
- Material Flow Coordinator
- BetaPlanner MidTerm
- AlphaPlanner
- BetaPlanner HSM
- BetaMatcher
- SigmaPlanner
- BetaPlanner Cold & Finishing
- ProductMatch
- SACSO - Steel Assignment Cutting and Slitting Optimizer
- PIANO - Plate Intelligent Assignment and Nesting Optimizer
This project will allow us to handle larger volumes of slabs with less manual workload and higher quality on the existing slab yard areas. We are convinced that it will succeed and that we can reduce the number of employees and still be better and handle larger volumes. We seek to achieve more efficient usage of our limited space for slabs and minimize crane/slabs movement.
