Abstract: To effectively response to the dynamic market, an ironsteel enterprise operates in the maketoorder (MTO) mode. Because of the dynamic features in such a mode, it is a challenge to make delivery date promise. In this paper, this problem is formulates as a dynamic constraint satisfaction problem. In this model, it takes the production capacity and the cost of earliness and tardiness into account. Due to the NPhardness of the problem, a heuristic is proposed to solve the problem by taking the advantage of constraint satisfaction consistency. An industrial case problem from a steel plant is presented to show the application of the proposed approach. Result shows that it can find a good solution and meanwhile it is computationally efficient.

Key words: iron and steel industry, delivery date promise, make-to-order (MTO) mode, constraint satisfaction