Method for controlling a continuous casting system

Control device for controlling a continuous casting system for producing slabs from a material, said continuous casting system comprising a plurality of molds for forming respective strands, said control device comprising a processor and a memory, said memory storing instructions executable by said processor, wherein execution of said instructions by said processor controls said control device to:

• receive a plurality of casting orders, each casting order comprising a demand quantity of the material, a respective slab width, and tolerance specifications with respect to the casting order,
• determine, for each of the casting orders, from the respective demand quantity and the respective slab width, a set of slabs to be cast with associated slab weights and slab widths,
• sort all slabs to be cast of all sets of all casting orders according to a sorting criterion to obtain a sorted base sequence of slabs to be cast, the sorting criterion comprising the slab widths,
• uniformly partition the sorted base sequence into a number of subsequences, the number of subsequences corresponding to a number of the molds,
• adjust, for each of the subsequences, the slab widths of the slabs to be cast of the subsequence under consideration of the tolerance specifications, wherein as a result of the adjusting the slab widths, width changes between two slabs to be cast immediately successively one after the other in the subsequence do not exceed a step value, wherein adjusted subsequences are obtained as a result of the adjusted slab widths,
• transmit control data to the continuous casting system for producing the slabs to be cast determined in the adjusted subsequences, wherein in the control data for each of the subsequences the order of production of the slabs corresponds to the order in which the slabs to be cast are determined in a respective one of the adjusted subsequences.