Bloom and billet mill expert system

A real-time expert system has recently been installed at British Steel Sections, Plates and Commercial Steels, Scunthorpe Works. The system is at the bloom and billet mill and has been designed to allow engineers to add and modify rules through a generic graphical rule editor. The mill has 26 soaking pits which reheat the steel prior to rolling. The expert system covers the soaking pits and the gas mixing station. It currently diagnoses operational problems with the soaking pits and generates messages which are displayed to the process operator via an existing message screen. Combustion and heat balance information is also calculated by the system for each pit every five minutes. Prior to installing the expert system, the calculations were performed manually for individual pits on an irregular basis. The on-line calculations are to be used to derive new diagnostic rules and provide supporting evidence to existing rules