A Heuristic Algorithm for Power Plant Coal Supply Planning Problems

This paper deals with a coal supply planning problem for power plants. We propose a mathematical optimization model to make decisions for coal pile sections, movement of reclaimers, and operation time of conveyor belts. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the total operation time of conveyor belts and total movement time of reclaimers. The algorithm firstly selects a pile section by considering both the location of reclaimers and the stock amount on that pile section. And then the shortest path from the selected pile section has to be put into the operation schedule and check whether the total operation time is satisfied. Then finally the new schedule is updated. To this end, we have tested the proposed algorithm comparing with the general standard optimization package for the simplified problem SCSPP. From the numerous test runs for comparing with the existing coal supply scheduling methods, We see that the proposed model may improve the coal supply operation by reducing significant coal supply costs