PRODUCTION OPERATIONS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM (POIS) FOR THE STEEL MAKING AREA

Background
During recent sales activities it has been found that quite a few customers, especially the ones with a
smaller budget, are reluctant to order a full-fledged Level 2 system along with a new plant or a new
revamp project. Main reasons forwarded are apprehensions about complexity of such a system and the
highly intensive nature of manpower association for running such a system. Cost of the system is
another major factor.
At the same time, these customers desire to have a good archival and versatile multi-device () reporting
system of the current and historical production operations. The multi-device reports are intended to be
used for decision making both related to current operations as well as long-term process adjustments.
It has also been observed that quite often they possess a simple calculation tool e.g. MS Excel, which is
used quite heavily by their process engineers and operators to do their process calculations to carry out
daily heat making activities. It would be a great advantage to both process engineers as well as
operators if such a tool is integrated with the above mentioned reporting system.
In view of the above, it is proposed that a cheap, scalable, complete automation ecosystem for data
acquisition, storage, management, analysis and versatile multi-device presentation of strategically
important production operations information is provided for these customers.
Objectives
The following are the main objectives of the proposed system:
To maximize production process visibility for day-to-day operational decision-making by
providing a multi-device compatible customizable information presentation functionality which
includes real-time process exception alerts
To present an opportunity for instantaneous evaluation of plant performance by providing a set
of customizable key performance indicators (KPIs) their continuously running current values
benchmarked against best-in-class achieved (both industry standard as well as internal).
To enable proactive analysis and identification of operation bottlenecks by providing access
and tools to inter and extrapolate process data with interactive dashboards both on a short-
time frame as well as historical time frame
To increase the usage of the system by providing a value-added simple interface to
metallurgists, process engineers and operators to create, modify and execute off-line process
calculations which they normally carry out during the course of a heat (maybe, currently using
Excel directly)
To reduce engineering and integration test time by
a) Reducing the programming effort required at Level 1 to serve process data to Level 2
b) Implementing an environment architecture where inter Level 2 process interface changes
may be very quickly executed and tested by even less experienced maintenance persons.

Details of functionalities to achieve the above objectives
Introduction
The Production Operations Intelligence System (POIS) is an accumulator, aggregator and disseminator
of the various components of production information process, product and resources, which are
received from the individual plant units of the Steel Melt Shop, the CCM, the Laboratory and the Level 3
system during production. The main functionalities include the following:
Collecting extensive event based and cyclic process information from individual plant units during
production and the Level 3 system.
Processing (validating, storing, relating, aggregating) of the process information collected thus
Hot metal tracking
Heat tracking
Production unit tracking
Disseminating this information, real-time and on-line, to all plant units, thus enabling heat pacing at
the individual plant units
Generation (both, time-based automatic and user-requested) of production and analytic reports
User authorized access to the data entry/update windows
Support tool for facilitating metallurgical calculations

POIS Functions
Information Collection
The backbone of the functioning of the POIS is the receipt of timely and correct process information
from the corresponding basic automation systems of the individual plant units. This information
includes not only cyclic and event-based data, but also the specific manual information entered into the
Level 1 system (or any other such) by the operator. POIS also communicates with any existing Level 3
system / ERP system to receive schedule information as well as the analysis data from laboratory.
The information collected include among others:
Schedule and analysis information from any existing Level 3 system / ERP system
Actual heat start / end and other process event times from the basic automation systems (Level 1)
of individual plant units
Detailed batch-wise material, energy and other utilities consumption and their actualization time
from the basic automation systems (Level 1) of individual plant units
Process measurements and their actualization time from the basic automation systems (Level 1) of
individual plant units
Delay information from the basic automation systems (Level 1) of individual plant units and the
manually entered ones
Equipment renewal information
Information Archival
All information received from the various partners are validated, co-related and archived in a logical
format in the POIS relational database.
For faster retrieval purposes some commonly accessed aggregate data are already processed and
stored accordingly.
Hot Metal Tracking
The hot metal is tracked by the hot metal ladle. The tracking starts when a ladle with hot metal arrives
at the HMPTS or HMDS for treatment and continues till the ladle is charged into the BOF.
Heat Tracking
Each heat is tracked in the steel melt shop and CCM. Heat tracking starts from BOF charging and
continues till finish of cutting of last slab of a heat at the CCM.

Production Unit Tracking
Each production unit is tracked for the current ongoing activities. The start of current activity and
predicted end times are tracked and reported.
Information Dissemination
Proper and timely distribution of process and control information is the foremost responsibility of the
POIS. As such, the relevant portions of all data which have been collected from various plant units and
the Level 3 / ERP are transmitted to all the relevant plant units (a POIS HMI terminal is located in each
of the plant unit control room to display this information). The information displayed includes:
Process information
An overview of the current state of production at each plant unit in the entire shop
A detailed information about the current state of production at any individual plant unit
Product information
Expected heat arrival time at the next planned processing unit. This helps the Level 2 system for the
individual plant units to pace the current heat under production at its unit.
The history and progress details of sequential processing of a heat at the various plant units
Real-time and on-line heat-wise progressive analysis information
A Gantt chart showing the planned vs. actual progress of heats at the various plant units
Resources information
Providing real-time and on-line equipment life information

Reports
The following category of production and analytic reports will be provided:
Heat Reports (individual heat plant-wise, individual heat overall history-wise)
Production Summary Reports (shift-wise, daily, weekly, monthly)
Analysis Reports (heat-wise)
Consumption Reports (heat-wise, plant unit-wise : shift-wise, daily, weekly, monthly)
Delay Reports (heat-wise, plant unit-wise : shift-wise, daily, weekly, monthly)
Productivity Reports
Quality Deviation Reports
Equipment Availability Reports
Energy and Utilities Usage Reports
Operations Visibility Report Retrospective vs. Current
Operations Performance Report Retrospective vs. Current
These reports are available on a crew-wise, shift-wise, daily, weekly, monthly basis or over any
selectable period of time (< last 90 days).
The reports can be configured to be generated automatically at certain configurable intervals or
alternatively can be generated manually by entering the period for which the report is required.
The reports are also reported as trends, generated from the above information.
These reports may be viewed on-line as well.
User Roles and Authorization
The access to various POIS HMI information and manipulation is restricted to various user roles. In
general all roles are granted the Read access right, while the Write, Update and Delete access
rights are assigned to the shop manager role only. However, the role and the access rights assigned are
configurable and will be defined during engineering stage.
Support tool for facilitating metallurgical calculations
As mentioned earlier, quite often process engineers and operators possess a simple calculation tool e.g.
MS Excel, which they use quite heavily to do their process calculations to carry out daily heat making
activities. But these tools are just Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) spreadsheets and support limited
functionalities for metallurgical process calculations. With these COTS tools it is very cumbersome to do
calculations which require instantaneous process values, involving accessing, copying, cutting and
pasting massive process data back and forth. It is proposed to provide such a simple calculation tool,
but far more integrated with the basic automation system.
Each single piece of operations data, whether directly measured from field, derived or made available by
external system to POIS e.g. ERP, is treated as a granular data item. An MS Excel interface is provided for
doing calculations, which can use the current values of such data item, just by referring to their
symbolical names in the formula bar. For example, to calculate the current average to two temperatures
(say, TempNo1 and TempNo2), all the user needs to do is to invoke the AVERAGE function of MS Excel
over two cells, which reflect the current value of these two temperature tags. The current values are
referenced from the POIS system through built-in data providing mechanisms.
A set of useful metallurgical process calculations for various plant units built based on the above tool will
be provided to the customer. These will be developed one-time by our process metallurgists. The
customer will then have the possibility of using it exactly as-it-is or tailor-made it to their specific needs.
No model guarantees would be provided.
Estimated Effort
The estimated effort to produce the first version of the system needs to be worked out very carefully
after taking into consideration what functionalities and their detailed features we will be including in the
first version.
However, to build a proto-type / demonstration system of the basic functionalities as mentioned in
Introduction would take a minimum of approx. 12 man-months.