Broner Metals Solutions

Broner Metals Solutions has announced the release of its new solution – Caster Auto Planner (CAP) to augment its existing portfolio of planning and manufacturing execution system solutions.

Caster Auto Planner provides enhanced functionality for the Broner Caster Scheduler solution for continuous caster planning and scheduling. Caster Auto Planner now fully automates the previous manual process of setting up tundish parameters and provides more consistent planning, as well as saving time and resources.

The most significant benefits of CAP include making the casting planning process more efficient, improving adherence to commodity targets and balancing liquid metal consumption.

Caster Auto Planner is a tool that aims to achieve maximum heats per day, meet the planned start dates, prioritise commodities and use non-prime as prime where possible to make the best possible seven-day plan considering all these constraints. It is used on a daily basis to routinely generate, update and report the plan in terms of the current metrics and KPI’s.

Caster Auto Planner performs caster planning, using constraint programming to automatically select tundish parameters, such as grade, quantity, start and end widths, and scheduling rules, on multiple casters. CAP functionality considers all casters in one process and calculates the best overall plan for a user-specified time-period, and also makes allowances for upstream constraints such as planned maintenance/downtime on key equipment (EAF, BF, BOF, casters etc), while balancing the use of liquid metal. It automatically determines tundish parameters for multiple tundishes on multiple casters based on order book (fed from capacity planning tool) and schedules these tundishes.

“Broner continues to develop unique new solutions in order to help metals producers to respond to a constantly evolving business environment. The new Caster Automated Planning solution is an important innovation that can provide benefits to most large steel producers”, said David Mushin, Broner’s CEO.