Improvement of cold mill precalculation accuracy using a corrective neural network

Cold rolling mill process in steel works uses stands of rolls to flatten a strip to a desired thichness. At Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) in Pohang, Korea, precalculation determines the mill settings before a strip actually enters the mill and is done by an outdated mathematical model. A corrective neural network model is proposed to improve the accuracy of the roll force prediction. Additional variables to be fed to the network include the chemical composition of the coil, its coiling temperature and the aggregated amount of processed strips of each roll. The network was trained using a standard backpropagation with 2,277 process data collected form POSCO from March 1995, then was tested on the unseen 200 data from the same period. The combined model reduced the prediction error by 55.4% on average.