Context-Aware Control for Quality Improvement in Liquid Steel Manufacturing

This paper presents an original theoretical and implementation framework of fractional order event-based control with the purpose of quality improvement at the end production line of a continuous casting process. A real-life steel manufacturing plant is taken into consideration in the study. A prior fractional order model is considered to tune a fractional order Proportional Integral controller that ensures an ideal flow velocity of liquid steel. A novel event-based fractional order methodology is proposed that uses internal and external process events in order to improve quality . The implementation strategy takes into consideration available software and hardware components at the plant site, offering a realistic and implementable solution, highly suitable for the current steel industry setting. Numeric simulations successfully validate the proposed methodology.