A mathematical model is established for order release in the make to order(MTO) steel enterprise with multiproduction
stage and multi-production route. Three indexes are built to measure the degree of delivery in advance or delay,
the balance of workload, and the continuity of production in adjacent stage. According to the model and the characteristics
of the problem, an order release algorithm based on workload balance is proposed. Firstly, the production routes are assigned
for the orders in the order pool based on work load control(WLC). Then the workload of machines is coordinated based on
the principle of the bottleneck stages. Finally, the load on non-bottleneck machines is balanced. The simulation experiments
verify the effectiveness of the model and the algorithm.