Severstal, one of the world's largest vertically integrated steel and mining companies, has become a partner of the Industry 4.0 technology competition run by the Moscow Innovation Cluster. The program is also supported by MTS, Krastsvetmet and ChTPZ.
Program Industry 4.0 brings together corporations to search and implement solutions to improve industrial production in Russia, automate processes and reduce costs. Companies will be able to choose projects in the field of creating digital twins, predictive analytics, machine learning, robotics, new materials, computer vision and many others.
Participants in the technology competition will receive expert support and recommendations from Severstal specialists, as well as the opportunity to pilot their proposals, new and innovative solutions at the company's industrial sites.
Severstal is actively introducing the industrial Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies at its industrial sites. They are used to improve the safety of production processes, increase the productivity of equipment by replacing manual control of the unit with control using AI technologies, to manage product quality, issue recommendations for the production process, as well as to improve energy efficiency. In particular, in 2020, a solution based on AI technology was successfully launched, which helped to increase the productivity of the continuous pickling unit No. 3 by more than 6.5%. The increase in productivity has become possible due to the automation of speed control of the middle section of the NTA-3. The II calculates the speed of control of the middle section of the unit and corrects it in real time. In the field of product quality management, it is possible to mark a project to recognize metal defects in images using neural networks. Since the start of these neural networks, more than 50 thousand km of metal strips have passed through them.
“For Severstal, support for acceleration programs in various areas has become an integral part of work with innovations. The company's experts regularly review many projects, select the most promising ones and, together with startups, test technologies in the conditions of our enterprises. Industry 4.0 is an important area for Severstal, and we already have a successful track record of developing our own solutions. However, we are always in search of fresh ideas and expect to see among the participants projects that can bring something new to the automation and improvement of production processes, "commented Dmitry Gorbachev, Business System Development Director at Severstal.
