Decision support system for the comprehensive assessment of flat products quality (DECFLAQ)

Producing in a competitive way is not always an easy task. Enterprises are increasingly incorporating advanced information systems which reflect the reality of the company in order to be capable of taking decisions in the most appropriate way for profit. One of these widely emerging technologies is decision support systems (DSSs). During the project, such a DSS was developed to support the production personnel in their daily work. The DSS provides reliable and reproducible information based on the following three areas. - Using a catalogue containing the requirements of the customer as well as the final use of the product, the requirements are compared in time with the conditions of the actual produced product. - The costs of the production of flat steel products were calculated in an increased granularity level from a periodical total production cost per tonne to an in-line single product costing estimation. The results of several cost indicators are presented to the operator. - The certain production conditions of a single product are used by grading methods to evaluate the product quality. Together with border values individually selected for each customer/order the evaluation of a set of rules is used to provide information to the operator to support his decision how to proceed with the actual produced product. Such a DSS was successfully developed during the project and implemented on several production plants. The experience of the operators was used for the system tuning.