Rolling mill control: architecture and applications

Considers some of the distributed aspects of the control of modern metal rolling mills. Such mills have a range of ever more ambitious targets, for example product quality, yield, metallurgy and throughput. These aims are supported by high levels of mill sophistication, in terms of plant equipment, instrumentation, actuators and control hardware. In spite of this sophistication, automation has many challenges, due primarily to the nature of both plant and process: the overall system is distributed, inherently multivariable, and subject to many uncertainties. The system is distributed in both spatial and temporal senses. A hot steel strip rolling mill is considered here, but the principles, problems and solutions apply at least in part to many other metal rolling mills.