Improved Cross Entropy Algorithm for Steelmaking Continuous Casting Production Scheduling with Minimum Power Consumption

A matrix encoding scheme for the steelmaking continuous casting( SCC) production scheduling( SCCPS) problem and the corresponding decoding method are proposed. Based on it,a cross entropy( CE) method is adopted and an improved cross entropy( ICE) algorithm is proposed to solve the SCCPS problem to minimize total power consumption. To describe the distribution of the solution space of the CE method,a probability model is built and used to generate individuals by sampling and a probability updating mechanism is introduced to trace the promising samples. For the ICE algorithm,some samples are generated by the heuristic rules for the shortest makespan due to the relation between the makespan and the total power consumption,which can reduce the search space greatly. The optimal sample in each iteration is retained through a retention mechanism to ensure that the historical optimal sample is not lost so as to improve the efficiency and global convergence. A local search procedure is carried out on a part of better samples so as to improve the local exploitation capability of the ICE algorithm and get a better result. The parameter setting is investigated by the Taguchi method of design-of-experiment. A number of simulation experiments are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the ICE algorithm in solving the SCCPS problem and also the superiority of the ICE algorithm is verified through the comparison with the standard cross entropy( SCE) algorithm.