Intelligent control station for improved quality management in flat steel production by a next generation decision support system (ICONSYS) : final report

The basic idea of the project was to investigate, if it is possible to enhance the current practice at the control stations at the steel production plants to take additionally environmental aspects into account, to automatically monitor the consideration of manufacturing specifications by the plant operators, and to detect and to optimise the usage of products with superior quality (also known as 'over-quality'). The results shall be integrated into a unique software tool that provides a decision support to the operators. Based on the analysis of the current situation at the production sites of the industrial partners a general concept was developed. KPIs were defined that describe the environmental impact of the steel production for the exemplarily selected plants as well as for transportation between them. An optimisation strategy for the consideration of the KPIs for to steel production was developed. A concept for the storage of manufacturing specifications was developed as well as a data model for their storage into a data base. A concept and methods for the detection of superior product quality were developed and implemented. All these modules were developed and implemented into a common framework, provided with interfaces to the existing IT environment of the production plants. The developed software tools were implemented at the sites of the industrial partners of the consortium. The personnel were guided in their usage and off-line as well as on-line open loop tests were processed. Finally the transferability was investigated which leads to a requirements list for the installation.