Using simulation to reshape the maintenance systems of caster segments

The maintenance of steel mills has a relevant impact on costs and productivity of steel industry. According to the traditional approach, one crew per shift takes care of the maintenance of key components of the slab caster with very limited process control, productivity and long lead-times. This paper introduces a new approach that makes each component move along a line where specific attention has to be paid to shared resources. The methodological approach is based on simulation, which has been applied to a real-life case study, represented by a leading Indian steel mill. Simulation is exploited, first, to point out the effect of the concurrent requirement of resources, demonstrating that a static sizing can lead to wrong designs, then, to properly consider the variance of execution times. Results show that caster maintenance arranged in a line designed according to the proposed methodology remarkably contributes to speed up the maintenance process.