Optimize cold sector material flow of a steel rolling mill

Abstract: The steel production is a highly capital and energy intensive industry that due to recent raw materials’ price increase and lowered demand, it has been squeezed and forced to look more deeply on how to add value to the customer at lower operative costs. The project was carried out on site at the ArcelorMittal’s millin Esch-Belval, Luxembourg which comprises an integrated melt shop, continuous casting plant and the rolling mill with the objectives of proposing optimization rules for the cold sector of the rolling mill and to analyze the impact of the future truckbay shipment area. The course of action followed was to draw a Value Stream Map (VSM) in order to understand the plants’ current status and serve as a roadmap to build a discrete event simulation model that after its validation, served as a support tool to analyze what-if scenarios. Similarly, a current status analysis of the  shipment/stock area was conducted collecting statistics about potential truckshipments and finally proposing a series of recommendations for its operation. The main proposed solutions to optimize the rolling mill’s cold sector were:(a) Integer programming model to globally optimize the scrap level when cutting the mother beams to customer size beams. (b) Updating pacemaker parameters and (c) Local process time improvements. Concerning the future truck loading, the simulation model was used as a support tool to dimension the transition area between the cranes’ and forklift operations resulting in a 6-9 bundles buffer capacity. Additionally, the current length-based storage policy was found to have competitive objectives so a turnover class-based storage policy is proposed with A, B, C classes which should provide an improved organization of the stock and travel distance of the cranes. The evaluation of the cranes’ performance remains an issue since there are currently no objective measures like, for instance, travelled distance. Optical measuring devices are suggested as one option to have a performance indicator that would help further investigate root cause problems in the shipping/stock area.