The aluminium rolling industry is crucial for transforming aluminium ingots into sheets and foils used in various sectors, including aerospace, automotive, packaging, and construction. It enables lightweight, corrosion-resistant, and recyclable materials, fostering innovation and sustainability in modern manufacturing. Additionally, it generates employment and drives economic growth in regions with aluminium production facilities.
Aluminium rolling is performed in two successive stages, the preheating and the hot rolling of aluminium slabs. A set of slabs arrives over time and, in the preheating stage, is assigned to a set of parallel furnaces. Once preheating is completed, each slab is unloaded and immediately transferred to a hot rolling mill. Each furnace operates in a first-in-first-out manner under slabs’ eligibilities and capacity constraints, while the hot rolling mill can handle a single slab every time instant, under predefined quality conditions regarding the minimum and maximum number of slabs per production cycle.
OptEngine
Impact & Offerings
OptEngine operates daily to optimize the scheduling of incoming aluminium slabs in available furnaces and the hot rolling mill, focusing on minimizing mill idle time and improving production quality by reducing problematic slab successions. It also allows users to simulate various managerial decisions, such as evaluating current inventory scheduling with new furnaces, adjusting wear limits, producing mixed cycles, selecting the number of production cycles, and prioritizing optimization criteria, like reducing idle time over enhancing production quality.
The results of optEngine have been tested and validated by a leading European aluminium rolling company, which serves customers in over 100 countries. Key outcomes include: a) idle time of the rolling mill reduced to less than 5%, achieving over 95% utilization, b) a 200% improvement in roll quality compared to current practices, c) scheduling of 1-2 production cycles (200-300 slabs) completed 5-6 times faster with guaranteed optimal solutions, d) efficient scheduling of multiple production cycles, ensuring high mill utilization and effective sequencing, and e) the ability to handle larger production cycles with 30-50 additional aluminium slabs.
