A customer who places a tentative order at a steel mill customarily receives a due-date quotation, namely the date by which the mill says that it will ship the order. The steel mill wants the due date to be early enough so that the customer won’t balk (withdraw the order), but late enough so that the probability of tardiness is low. This note obtains expressions for the tardiness probability at...

Thickness accuracy of plate production depends on Automatic Gauge Control (AGC) in the plate mill area. A typical modern thickness control system design and implementation of a steel plate mill is discussed together with the impact on the design of process models, available measurements, available control actuators and material properties. A highlevel software design approach provides the abili...

We describe an application of the BOXES learning algorithm of Michie and Chambers (1968) to a large-scale, real-world problem, namely, learning to control a steel mill. By applying BOXES to a model of a skinpass mill (a type of steel mill), we find that the BOXES algorithm can be made to produce a robust controller relatively quickly. Various aspects of the BOXES algorithm are adapted for the t...

Enhancing the accuracy of an approximate cost estimate is a critical issue since the estimate ordinarily predicts the total cost of a project with insufficient project information. In order to facilitate the approximate cost estimate process, this paper proposes a computer-based integrated system that enables the flexibility to varying amount and accuracy of available information, higher accura...

Steel rolling process control is the key working procedure of the steel yield process, and that the control of the rolling process is the important factor to affect the quality and cost of the product. This paper is focus on the mill control. Firstly, the model of the mill is founded by exponential smoothing. Then, the method of self-learning optimization can be used to control the model. The o...

With high fuel prices, fuel-savings technologies can provide significant economic benefits to steel mills. Reheating furnaces in integrated and mini-mills consume approximately half of the natural gas used to produce hot-rolled products. Recently, Praxair’s Dilute Oxygen Combustion technology (previously demonstrated for productivity improvements on mini-mill billet reheating furnaces) was exte...

This paper presents an optimization approach to deal with the problem of minimizing the hot rolling time of a steel slab. Unlike traditional approaches, this work also considers the chemical composition of the steel slab as a parameter, allowing the automatic setup for different steels of the hot rolling mill. To validate the approach discussed here, a six-stand rolling mill is modeled as an op...

In the paper we rewiev the experience with the steel from Cold Rolling Mill Kraluv Dvur near Prague, where the steel for barrel module 0 prototype of the TILECAL calorimeter was fabricated. The measurements of the tolerances, mechanical properties and the chemical composition are presented.

This paper describes the development ,and installation of the 5 Mill Scheduler, a dynamic scheduling application for a hot steel mill. The main objective of the scheduler is to dynamically generate ,and revise schedules, ,and make effective use of the resources of the phant, while satisfying a complex set of constraints dealing with the dynamic behavior of the resources and the material process...