A comparison of adaptive control strategies for hot steel strip rolling mills

Abstract

Many modeling situations occur in which the plant has uncertain dynamics, nonlinearities, time varying characteristics and noise corrupted input and output measurements. These processes generally require a human operator whose function is to provide intelligent modeling and control. This exact situation occurs in the modeling and control of roll force in a hot steel rolling mill. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate and compare various adaptive control strategies for this problem. The first strategy uses a parameter identification technique to track the parameters in the roll force setup model from one steel run to the next. The next algorithm provides feedback control from run to run by an adaptive controller which uses a linear reinforcement learning scheme to adjust its parameters. The third method accounts for the above complexities by approaching the problem from a behavioral and structural point of view. The behavior of the model is assessed through a performance evaluator and the model is modified structurally and parametrically to improve the performance of the system as the process evolves. The derivation is based on correlation techniques and linear reinforcement learning theory, the latter of which provides memory and intelligence to the algorithm to model the decision process of the human operator. The results of this work serve to reinforce the opinion that the nonlinear mathematical structure of the model should be able to change from one steel run to the next in order to compensate for changes in mill characteristics and in the mill environment. Modeling results are presented from actual mill data and comparisons are made with time invariant models. In addition, the algorithms are general enough so that they may be easily applied to other processes that seem to defy traditional modeling techniques. They are not case dependent.