Enacom had its technical paper “Optimization of Steel Plate Storage Yard Crane Scheduling” published in the June 2026 issue of Iron & Steel Technology, the magazine of the Association for Iron & Steel Technology (AIST) (Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 68–73). The work was presented at AISTech 2025, in Nashville (USA), and published in the conference proceedings.
The challenge: storing plates and loading with the fewest movements
In steel plate production, storing material efficiently is decisive for speeding up vehicle loading and keeping the yard organized. Overhead cranes are often a bottleneck in this process: every extra movement consumes time and increases the risk of yard disorganization.
The solution: a heuristic that decides the next movements
The paper presents a heuristic approach that determines the next crane movements to minimize the total number of movements required to complete plate loading, while organizing the yard to make future shipments easier. The solution takes into account equipment physical limits, stacking rules and the availability of cranes and roller tables.
Results in a real case
- From five to one: optimization reduced the number of movements required to perform the loadings from five to one in about 50% of the cases.
- From 15 to six: the maximum number of movements per loading dropped from 15 to six.
- Better than manual operation: in the real case analyzed, the solution proved more efficient than the manual planning done by crane operators.
Partnership with Gerdau
The work is the result of an Enacom project in partnership with Gerdau, with the participation of specialists from the Ouro Branco (MG) plant, and had the support of FAPEMIG and CNPq. The paper is authored by Paulo Sérvulo Leoncio dos Santos, Adriano Chaves Lisboa, Miguel Marques Ferreira, Matheus de Oliveira Mendonça, Igor Mateus Ribeiro Caetano, Gustavo Rodrigues Lacerda Silva and Douglas Alexandre Gomes Vieira, from Enacom, and Luiz Paulo Horta Torres, Ricardo Lopes Tinoco, Bruno Alvares and Bruno da Silva Breder, from Gerdau.
Read more
See the paper summary and publication details on the Enacom website, the steel yard movement case and the solutions for Steel. AIST made the full text available on its website for a limited time after publication; the paper is also part of the AISTech 2025 proceedings.