Fine-tuning of the rolling mill using an Internetbased on-line application–processing interface

In order to meet the challenge of steady growing pressure to improve product quality, rolling mills employ extensive automation and sophisticated on-line data sampling techniques. However, the steel sheet quality is influenced by the entire ʹlife historyʹ of the rolled strip. Application of the self-organizing maps helps to discover hidden dependencies influencing the quality parameters, such as flatness, profile, wedge, thickness and width deviations and surface quality, as well as mechanical and magnetic properties. A dataset collected from the measured parameters in a strip location corresponds to a proper process state, described by a point in the state space. Time series of points corresponding to each sampled data set show how the system ʹmovesʹ in the state space and how the predicted product quality is changing within the strip.