Decision Support Systems for Steel Production Planning—State of the Art and Open Questions

This chapter addresses several open questions or shortcomings in the academic literature revolving around decision support (DS) systems for steel production planning. These open questions or shortcomings are summarized as (1) failure to incorporate tacit production knowledge into steel decision support systems, (2) negligence of physical boundaries/limitations of the steel manufacturing process, and (3) lack of global (as opposed to local) optimization approaches in steel scheduling algorithms. Dealing with each of the above-mentioned shortcomings tackles two of the steel industry’s most important challenges, namely decarbonization and digitization: on the one hand, better production planning prevents production losses, waste, scrap and improves the environmental footprint of steel factories. On the other hand, the methodologies given in this book can theoretically be integrated into modern steel factories that rely on cyber-physical systems.