Supervisory control of reheating furnace

In steel works, reheating furnace is an essential part of a rod mill plant and it treats various types of billets continuously. Although getting an optimal setting for a single billet is simple, control setting for whole groups of billets is a difficult task. In this work, we studied a detail mathematical model and optimal control setting of reheating furnace. As the mathematical model of each billet is a partial differential equation, on-line control is almost impossible for the whole billets charged into the furnace. Therefore, we tried to provide a guideline for optimal setting value of the roof(index) temperature for the target billets which account for about 20% of the charged billets.