With diversified requirements and varying manufacturing environments

the optimal production planning for a steelmill becomes more flexible and complicated. The flexibility provides operators with auxiliary requirements through an implementable integrated production planning. In this paper

a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is proposed for the optimal planning that incorporates various manufacturing constraints and flexibility in a steel plate mill. Furthermore

two solution strategies are developed to overcome theweakness in solving the MINLP problem directly. The first one is to transformthe original MINLP formulation to an approximate mixed integer linear programming using a classic linearization method. The second one is to decompose the originalmodel using a branch-and-bound based iterative method. Computational experiments on various instances are presented in terms of the effectiveness and applicability. The result shows that the second method performs better in computational efforts and solution accuracy.