Prediction for Manufacturing Factors in a Steel Plate Rolling Smart Factory using Data Clustering based Machine Learning

A Steel Plate Rolling Mill (SPM) is a milling machine that uses rollers to press hot slab inputs to produce ferrous or non-ferrous metal plates. To produce high-quality steel plates, it is important to precisely detect and sense values of manufacturing factors including plate thickness and roll force in each rolling pass. For example, the estimation or prediction of the in-process thickness is utilized to select the control values (e.g., roll gap) in the next pass of rolling. However, adverse manufacturing conditions can interfere with accurate detection for such manufacturing factors. Although the state-of-the-art gamma-ray camera can be used for measuring the thickness, the outputs from it are influenced by adverse manufacturing conditions such as the high temperature of plates, followed by the evaporation of lubricant water. Thus, it is inevitable that there is noise in the thickness estimation. Furthermore, installing such thickness measurements for each passing step is costly. The precision of the thickness estimation, therefore, significantly affects the cost and quality of the final product. In this paper, we present machine learning (ML) technologies and models that can be used to predict the in-process thickness in the SPM operation, so that the measurement cost for the in-process thickness can be significantly reduced and high-quality steel plate production can be possible. To do so, we investigate most-known technologies in this application. In particular, Data Clustering based Machine Learning (DC-ML), combining clustering algorithms and supervised learning algorithms, is introduced. To evaluate DC-ML, two experiments are conducted and show that DC-ML is well suited to the prediction problems in the SPM operation. In addition, the source code of DC-ML is provided for the future study of machine learning researchers.