Prof. Tomomi Matsui and colleagues have received a Research Award in the Technical Division of Instrumentation, Control, and Systems Engineering from the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan.

Prof. Tomomi Matsui and colleagues have received a Research Award in the Technical Division of Instrumentation, Control, and Systems Engineering from the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan.

Award Winner：

Yutaka Tsukinokizawa（Nippon Steel）, Tetsuaki Kurokawa（NS-TEXENG）, Tomomi Matsui（Tokyo Tech）, Yusuke Takahashi（Gibraltar Life Insurance）

Research Theme：

Adapting the solution for the vertex coloring problem to the problem of slab yard stacking

In steelmaking, the role of the slab yard is becoming significant. The slab yard is a place where slabs, or steel that is being transitioned from the steelmaking process to the rolling process, are temporarily stored. In the slab yard, slabs need to be sorted into stacks such that the slabs do not inadvertently move even while as many slabs are stacked as possible to avoid delays in the overall process. This is called the slab stacking problem.
In this research, we adapted an existing solution for a similar problem -- the vertex coloring problem -- to the slab stacking problem. We demonstrated the efficiency of our approach through comparison with conventional slab stacking methods in a series of computational experiments.