THE SLAB DESIGN PROBLEM IN THE STEEL INDUSTRY

Planners in the steel industry must design a set of steel slabs to satisfy the order book subject to constraints on ( 1) achieving a total designed weight for each order using multiples of an order-specific production size range, ( 2) minimum and maximum sizes for each slab, and ( 3) feasible assignments of multiple orders to the same slab. We developed a heuristic solution based on matchings and bin packing that a large steel plant uses daily in mill operations.