Jurgen Dorm, Christian Doppler laboratory for Expert Systems

EEL PRODUCTION INVOLVES A number of stages, such as melting, casting, rolling, and forging, that entail complex chemical and thermic reactions as well as intricate mechanical operations. Because these processes do not lend themselves to exact mathematical modeling, steel manufacturers must turn to techniques for reasoning with incomplete and uncertain data. Their decisions often rely on the experience of individual experts. Nearly all steelmakers worldwide now use expert systems, fuzzy logic, and neural nets to improve quality assurance and production efficiency. This special track of IEEE Expert looks at several typical, successfully fielded systems. For many years, the steel industrys main objective has been to maximize production by automating processes and streamlining plant organization. As with the Republic of Koreas Kwangyang Works, steel manufacturers have been erecting new plants from
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scratch, locating them near the sea to make the delivery of steel from blast furnace to final shipment as direct as possible. Because they restricted the diversity of their products, such new plants have become very competitive. Asias steel industry, in particular, used these approaches in the 1980s to produce high-quality steel cheaper than its Western competitors. (See the sidebar for historical overview of steel production.) However, the continuing improvement of substitutes for steel has raised the demand for even higher-quality steel with dedicated characteristics. By using different alloying metals and various heat and surface treatments, steelmakers now can offer a manifold of products. Ongoing research into new steel qualities has produced a broad range of products, which present many newcontrol problems. Although other industries reflect the same tendency toward processing in smaller lot sizes, the steelmaking environment shows more diversity than most be0885-9000/96/$4 00 0 1996 IEEE

cause of the particular characteristics of its matenal and manufactunng technology Furthermore, the capital-intensive nature of the industry can make unanticipated violakons of technological constraints extremely costly A look at several typical factors will illustrate these considerations Most steelmaking processes are temperature-sensitive For each process, the steel must have aprescribed temperature, and any time it spends waiting on the next processing step will incur a costly reheating. Moreover, because chemical reactions depend on temperature, any loss of heat during processing may degrade the steels quality Iithe prescribed sohkfication temperature profile is violated, an incorrect internal structure of the steel might result Although process ames are difficult to predict precisely, steelmakers do exercise some degree of control. Treatment time in furnaces depends on the temperature, which can be controlled through heat input, generally subIEEE EXPERT

Historical overview on steelmaking

j e c t to w i n e global energy constraint. Steel-

maher\ c;in a l s o control casting and rolling tiiiic\ to w i n e extciit by varying the speed at \\ hich they run thc caster or rolling mill. By slouing ;I process down if it appears that an ordei- uill arrive too early at the next riggre, g r r i i , . 01\peeding it up if it appears it will arr i \ c too late. they can also use real-time proce\s control t o meet requirements for synchronicity. (An aggregate is a common steelmahing term lor machine.) Tec h no Iogical cons ide i-at ions in the proeltiction of' highei- grades of steel impose reqiiireincnts on the sequence in which orders arc pi-oduccd. Chemicals added to steel to ;ichie\ c certain charucterirtics react with the \teelmahiny aggregate. Residuals remain in the agyrcgate and may be absorbed by one of the n e x t orders. which inay be corrupted by thi\ infiltration. The width and thickness ot the stccl product also constrain sequences i n the ca9ring and rolling processes. Production-run ciigineers will avoid some obviously incompatible sequences, but sometimes \chediilc incompatible ones anyway for lack o f a closed tractable causal model that would prei ent them from doing s o . Afterward, cau\al models can explain these errors, and this negative experience will lead to a modification of the production process.

Compared to other industries,iron and steel production has a very long history. Archaeologists have found iron tools, weapons, and omaments in prehistoric tombs, and between 1350 and 1100 BC early societies in various parts of the world had begun smelting iron ore into iron on a large scale. The earliest smelting was done in primitive, charcoal-fueledhearths that used wind power to provide combustion.This direct reduction produced a soft, malleable wrought iron. which early ironworkers then forged by hammering. Hearths soon gave way to simple blast furnaces. Reaching a height of 16 feet by I350 AD, these fumaces were continuously charged with iron ore and charcoal,and later limestone, ;I\ the smelting process evolved. Because the produced high-carbon iron was rather brittle, i t could neither be rolled nor forged. The first indirect reduction occurred in Belgium about 1620. The two-step procedure first used an initial smelting to eliminate the ore's oxygen content. The second step purified the resulting pig iron, removing carbon and other elements.Later improvements involved the u s ~ ing and handling of the steel. Because improvements in steelmaking usually entail huge investments,the modern steel plant evolves slowly over decades. A new fundamental technology seems to arise every I O t o 15 years that requires a reorganization of the production process. The introduction olcontinuous casters in the late 1970s marked a such great turning point. Casters have enhanced the productivity significantly, but the need to continuously feed them creates new problems. Minimills for rolling small lots are the latest profound innovation.

Automating production
The nature of these problems that complicate production control-the vagueness and a h ;iy\-changing nature of the knowledgeha\ prevented steelmakers from making c l o \ e d control loops for steel production. Thi\ industry has always been very innovat i l e i n the application of new production technologic\ and the latest computer technology. I t was one of the first. for example, to :ipply fault-tolerant computer systems to fulfill the high requirements for availability and reliability o f control systems. Despite t h i \ I-apid automation. the process operator ha\ remained ;in important link in the production proce\s. and with the introduction of thew new control \ystems. operators are being overloaded with proce5s data. (Sec tht: moclern steel production sidebar, next page.) The stecl industry adopted expert systems relatively early lor further automating production. The five leading Japanese steel companic\ reported the first successful applicat i o n s . ' The designers o f the Scheplan whecluling system. for instance, claimed that
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its operation saved $ 1 million a year by reducing the time that ladles carrying hot steel to the casters must wait.' Although quality optimization and energy consumption are important aims, the most important motivation for applying expert systems seems to be production standardization. In the steelmaking plant, for example, it is more important to have a safe and continuous supply from the blast furnace than a high, but irregular, supply. Because there is so much freedom in production decisions, it is better for quality assurance purposes to have formal rules about how to proceed, even if they are less than optimal. Having an expert system that acts as a consultant or even as a decision maker will make decisions more transparent.

impossible to iiieii\urc the teinperaiurc 111side the furnace. so htincli-eel\ 01' \cti\ot.\ O I I the walls indirectly nic;i\tii-c tlic hol iiict:il.\ temperature. Existing expert $1\teiiij addre\\ t~ o problerns: predicting abnormal \ittiation\ \tic11 ;I\ slips (abnormal and \tidclcn de\cciicliiig\ of the raw matcrinl\ charged i n tlic l u i nace) and channeling (tlic heated g;i\ reache\ the top ofthe l'iiriiace \\ i t l i o i i t rc'action) and keeping the thermal coliclition stahlc,. Operator\ can adjii\t furnace lieat IC\e l \ and hot-metal temperattire\ t>> 1ii;in 1 pi1x1I 112 such variables a s ore-to-cokc ratio\. hla\t temperature\, fuel-iii,jection IC\ cl \. iiiicl t>la\t moisture levels. If the hot-rnctal \ i l i c o i i falls below the desired \ alue. the hot-iiictal temperature will ; i I w he below i t \ goal. 'l'lic operator will need to iiicrciw the heat l c \ e l . The problems i n controlling t h i \ procc\\ ~ r c the long reaction time\ a n c l the tlil'lcren~I-cactions of human operators. I n d i \ idual operatorb use dillerent ;ictioiis. art tlieiii ;II (111ferent times. and apply clillcrcnl magiiitutle\ of change\. Thcy also I'rcqucritly u\c old tliita from previou\ c;i\es to clccitle irc~ictioii\. Mos t bl a\ t I'Llr1i:lce\ 111a~iagcI'\ t hc I'C' I (11 c aim not to optimic.e hut to \(ariclardi/e t h i \ control. The unccrtninty ol'iiian) clata \ ;iluc\ makes it difficult to find ;I \iiiiplc control ZIIgorithm. An cxpcrt \) \ t c i i i lei\ ii1;iiiuI;ictiircrs build ;I moclel o l the ph) \ic;iI and c,liL>iiiical prows\ in the I'tirti;ice u i t l i \! tiiholic values. abs tract ing from t lie [ Ii() ti \:iiicl\ o 1
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Applying expert systems

Steelmakers apply expert systems instead of conventional software because the controlling software has to reason with existing uncertainties and master the inherent complexity of typical control problems. The control ofthe blast furnace illustrates i\sut.s motivating the iniplernentation of expert systems. The main focus of the blast furnace quality improvement effort is hot-metal silicon variability. This is controlled by the heat levels inside the furnace. If the furnace is too hot, the silicon will increase; too cool, s i l i con levels will decrease. Unfortunately. it is

FEBRUARY 1996
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Modern steel production and control

Steel production requires different groups of processes often involvproducts up to 1200C in a reheat furnace eliminates surface defects ing different plants. In the iron-making stage, steelworkers charge iron and prepares them for hot rolling. This process also poses many control oxide (pellets, sintered ore, or iron ore), coke, and limestone in layers problems, both in combustion efficiency and steel exit temperature. into a blastfurnace to produce pig iron. Typically, a blast furnace can Steelmakers control the reheating process with mathematical models, hold several thousand cubic meters and operates continuously for about linear programming, and expert systems. The control of the reheating IO years before shutting down for repairs. process is closely linked with the hot-metal process. Starting at the top of the furnace, the charge takes about eight hours Other steps involve rolling the cast goods in the rolling mills, first to descend through the shaft. Solid, liquid, and gas coexist in the blast rolling the steel warm and then cold to achieve high accuracies in surfurnace, with heat exchanges and reduction reactions governing the face structure, dimensions, compression, and impact strength. These phenomena inside. These are expressed in terms of furnace conditions stages each involve several passes. The rolling process greatly affects and heat. Changes in the properties of the raw materials and the changthe quality of the final product, so the thickness, shape, and chemical ing profile of the furnace body disturb the furnaces operation. The properties of the rolled steel require highly accurate control. Controlprocess consumes huge amounts of energy. ling the pace of the mill presents another problem, one that involves deSpecial torpedo cars transport the liquid pig iron tapped from the termining the optimum reheating furnace discharge interval to allow blast furnace (up to 10,000tons of hot metal per day for large blast furthe hot rolling mill to run continuously. naces) to the steelmaking shop. Here, basic oxygenfumaces (BOF) reFinally, the rolling mill produces a variety of steel products. Batch or tine the iron steel to the desired composition by blowing oxygen into continuous annealing completes the processing of the steel and deterthe hot metal, which oxidizes impurities. During each run, or hear, the mines the properties of the final products. Here, the mill heats steel processing of up to 300 tons of pig iron takes about 20 to 30 minutes. products to a predetermined, closely controlled temperature for a given Steelworkers must control molten steels composition and temperalength of time to obtain the desired quality. The final stage may involve ture. Such control is especially critical in the oxygen-blowing step. a variety of operations such as pickling (descaling coils with acid), Recently, because of the increased use of continuous casting and widetempering, or coating of the produced coils, pipes, wires, and plates, before shipment to customers. (Figure A shows the cross section of a spread use of hot-metal pretreatment, the requirements for blowing control have become stricter. If no direct charging from the blast typical high-grade steel.) furnace is possible or if huge amounts of (cold) scrap iron are charged, plants must use electric arc furnaces to smelt the metal, a process that requires a huge amount of energy and takes considerably longer than the BOF converter process. Next comes ladle refinement, where the liquid steel is poured into ladles, before cranes transport it to various refinement aggregates (machines).In making the various grades of steel that customers order, these aggregates eliminate further impurities and add further alloying metals. The last stage in the steelmaking shop either uses continuous casters to cast the steel into billets, blooms, or slabs, or a more traditional process that involves making ingots, soaking the ingots, and passing them through a slabbingblooming mill. In continuous casting, real-time control is very important. Fluctuations in the level of molten steel in the mold of the caster cause inclusions of gas in the metal Figure A. Cross section (x600) of K1OO steel produced at Austrias Bohler Uddeholm plant. An ocid-treated austenit, it and surface defects. Heating the cast contains 1.23% carbon, 0.4% silicon, and 12.5% manganese.

measured data values. Rules allow the specification of certain standards-when and how an operator should react. One of the first well-described systems in this domain was Nippon Steels Artificial and Logical Intelligence System (ALIS), which controls several blast furnaces. Comparisons between human and expert system performance showed that in 25% of the cases studied. the expert system performed better and only in 7% did the human excel. Fur-

thermore, the system is continually modified to improve its competence.

This issue
Today, as the latest conferences on production control in steelmaking show, almost every steelmaker-from developing countries to the traditional steelmakers-applies expert systems.4 O n e great challenge now

facing the steel industry is to improve the self-adapting capabilities of expert systems. A s mentioned, modifications of the production process are quite regular. and the tendency is to adopt even more flexibility. Intelligent steelmaking aggregates that adapt themselves to new steel compositions and requirements for the produced good are i n portant research topics now. Kcscarch into intelligent organizers that can learn ne& strategies if the manufacturing objective or I E E E EXPERT
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the production technology changes is also ongoing. The first article, by Nicolas Pican, Frkdkric Alexandre, and Patrick Bresson, addresses this issue. They have developed a system that incorporates an artificial neural network to preset the parameters of a steel temper mill. They also show that a combination ofAI and conventional techniques often solves industrial problems best. An intermediate step in self-learning systems are systems that assist human experts. Because users of expert systems are not familiar with expert system techniques, they need simple techniques to adapt a system to new production facilities and strategies. The article by Jiirgen Dorn and Reza Shams describes experience along these lines and makes propositions for improving this capability. A focus of future research is the cooperation between expert systems in the steel industry. At the moment, expert systems are singleuser, front-end computer systems dedicated to one function. Their integration with the existing organization is very simplistic. Most systems couple to a process computer or a production-planning system to obtain required input data. However, stronger coupling would increase the benefits of expert systems. The simplest solution is an expert system that performs this cooperation as its main task. However, a more generic approach would let expert systems cooperate in an open framework. For example, a steelmaking shop scheduling system should receive knowledge of the status of the blast furnace, because the supply situation will influence the scheduling strategy. More useful would be cooperation between a scheduling system and an intelligent machine such as a caster that can decide which sequences are good and when maintenance operations should occur. Negotiations are also necessary between a steelmaking plant and its customersthe rolling mills and other plants. Because these plants operate under different sequencing criteria, a best sequence for one plant is not necessarily good for the other. Despite even more pervasive automation in the future, human experts will remain unavoidable for production control in the steel industry, because new production failures that cannot be handled adequately by a system occur quite regularly.

Jiirgen Dorn is a senior researcher at the Chris-tian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems in Vienna, a basic research laboratory established by the Austrian steel industry to improve technology transfer from universities to steel industry. He received his MS and PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin. He was involved in the development of two scheduling expert systems for the Austrian steel industry and works as a consultant for the international steel industry in the field of expert systems. He is member of the AAAI. Readers can contact him at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems, Vienna Univ. of Technology,Paniglgasse 16,A-1040 Vienna, Austria; dom@dbai.tuwien.ac.at.

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References
1. T. Saito, Application ofArtificial Intelligence in the Japanese Iron and Steel Industry, Proc. Sixth Intl Federation ofAutomatic Control Symp. Automation in Mining, Mineral andMetal Processing, 1989,pp. 30-38. 2. M. Numao and S. Morishita, Scheplan-AScheduling Expert for Steelmaking Process, Proc. Fourth C o f Artificial Intelligence Applications, AIAAPress, Menlo Park, Calif., 1988, pp. 467472.

3. S. Amano et al., Expert System for Blast Furnace Operation at Kimitsu Works, J. Iron and Steel Inst. of Japan, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1990, pp. 105-1 10.
4.

Preprints ofthe Intl Con$ on Computerized Production Control in Steel Plant, The Korean Institute of Metals and Materials, Seoul, 1993.

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