A FUZZY CONCEPT FOR THE OPERATIVE MANAGEMENT OF STEEL PLANT-OPERATION

Short-term planning changes in job processing as well as equipment trouble and planned repairs require operative control decisions in the steel plant, which should not affect the process stability and guarantee the on-schedule production of various high-quality steel grades as well as high utilization of the plant capacity. A fuzzy control system, which develops operative production plans matched to the actual process state, assists the forward planner in the operative control of the steel plant. This planning and control system uses a function model of the steel plant process for the formation of its decisions, in which all the production phases of the melts are described as time-variable operations with fuzzy pre- and after-conditions in the structure of a fuzzy Petri network. Such a fuzzy system concept has been developed and tested jointly by the Huttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann GmbH and MIT GmbH for operative steel plant control at HKM. The contribution reports on the fuzzy system concept and the first results of this cooperative project.