Optimization for Storage Scheduling of Steel Plates Based on Cloud Manufacturing Platform

With the development of cloud manufacturing, the automation of storage scheduling becomes popular in the steel industry. However, the high customization of steel plates makes the storage scheduling too complex to be optimized. To overcome this challenge, we propose to utilize the big data of steel plate orders and warehouse status to optimize the storage scheduling of steel plates. The agglomerative hierarchical clustering is first adopted to reduce the complexity of excessive steel plate specifications, then an optimization problem is defined to formulate the storage scheduling of steel plates with safety. A two-stage heuristic (TSH) algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem with low complexity. In TSH, steel plates are first assigned to multiple stacks, and then the arrangement of each stack is determined. Experiments are executed based on a cloud manufacturing platform for steel plates production and storage, and the results prove the effectiveness of the proposed works.