Profile Measurement of Rails in a Rolling Mill: Implementing and Evaluating Autonomic Computing Capabilities

Profile measuring is a key data acquisition process in the rail manufacturing industry. In rail rolling mills, profile measurement systems inspect the shape of the rail profiles to assess their dimensional quality. This assessment can be used in order to provide feedback for shape control devices in upstream manufacturing, and also to check whether the products are compliant with rail standards and client requirements. This paper deals with designing autonomic computing capabilities, specifically self-awareness, to a rail profile measurement system based on laser range finding, and then evaluating their suitability for the following tasks: Automatically detect changes in both the working environment and the operating conditions, and warn process computers and operators of the rail rolling mill when working conditions indicate that the accuracy of the inspection system has fallen below a given threshold.