Knowledge management and decision support with special focus to process and quality optimisation at flat steel production (Knowdec) : final report

The European steel industry is exposed to a very competitive market. Manufacturing high quality flat steel products demands highly skilled personnel, excellent plant technology, suitable plant maintenance, good quality of raw material, suitable automation systems, proper set points for control systems, etc. In all these areas the knowledge and experience of the technical staff, gathered during many years in operation and tuning their processes plays a big role. Problems in common usage of this knowledge and experience arise from its heterogeneous distribution over the individual staff members, human obliviousness, and knowledge erosion by leaving staff members. The goal of this project is to investigate and implement methods to collect this knowledge, to represent and store it, to embed it in a process structure framework, to make it accessible in a sharable way, and to apply it to quality improvement.