Proposal of evaluation indices for human-made rivalrous resource allocation in steel manufacturing

During steel production, pig iron generally streams from a huge blast furnace into respective downstream factories where various types of steel are produced as finished products. Although a production schedule is planned from a holoscopic viewpoint, in practice, human-made rescheduling is eventually conducted immediately before manufacturing to adapt to dynamic environmental changes. Rivalous engineers in this environment deliberate and then allocate resources to each factory. This study proposes six indices to evaluate such human-decided allocation. Then, computer simulations of several scenarios are used to elucidate the indices' salient characteristics and to assess their effectiveness. (C) 2013 CIRP.