Four Stage Scheduling of Steel Making using Earliest Deadline First Algorithm

Steel production (Steel Making, Rolling Process) is an extremely complex process and determining coherent Schedules for the wide variety of production steps in a dynamic environment, where disturbances frequently occur, is a challenging task. In the recent steel scenario, the heats directly sent to Rolling mills for rolling it into finished products directly after casting in continuous casting machines. In this scenario it is always important to schedule the heats from converter to rolling Mills encompassing argon Rinsing Station, Continuous casters. In this paper, authors have focused on the average waiting time, deadline deviation for each heat produced and rolled, so that all the heats will be targeted to produce with minimum waiting and without deadline time deviation. The earliest Dead line first algorithm was used to schedule the heats in each stage of the production to achieve least deviation of dead line and reduction in average waiting time. The results are compared with other conventional scheduling methods First Cum First Scheduling (FCFS), Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduling methods. Better results have been achieved with EDF algorithm.