CESMII, the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute has picked time series AI specialist Falkonry together with ArcelorMittal for a joint smart manufacturing project. The project is under the CESMII Roadmap Projects RFP3 initiative which aims to accelerate the adoption of sustainable and smart manufacturing practices in production operations.

CESMII is the United States’ national institute on Smart Manufacturing. In partnership with the Department of Energy, its agenda is to drive cultural and technological transformation and secure industrial technologies as national advantages.

The technical objective of CESMII is to enable frictionless movement of information–raw and contextualised data – between real-time operations and the people and systems that create value in and across manufacturing organisations, and hence to improve manufacturing performance through measurable improvements in areas such as: quality, throughput, costs/profitability, safety, asset reliability and energy productivity.

One of the issues in the cold rolling of sheet steel, strip breakage, results in yield loss due to line stoppage, re-work, and may also cause damage to equipment. The objective of this project is to automatically classify strip break events using time series AI and machine learning (ML), and provide their explanations from time series data. Once the cause is determined using these explanations, corrective measures can be implemented to prevent repeat occurrences of strip breakage, thereby improving production efficiency. Falkonry’s time series AI will analyse the tandem rolling mill’s operational data in real-time and provide actionable insights directly to production and maintenance teams in the steel mill.

“CESMII’s objective is to drive innovation through the democratisation of smart manufacturing and we chose Falkonry and ArcelorMittal from a large pool of proposals to further this objective,” said John Dyck, CEO, CESMII. “Staying competitive in metal manufacturing requires reliable and efficient operations and this project aims to develop a reusable and interoperable solution for productivity improvement in steel mills.”

“This joint opportunity with Falkonry will enable us to leverage the power of AI/ML in addressing a major challenge during the cold rolling of steel in a Continuous Cold Mill – occurrence of strip breaks which result in line stoppages and pose a risk of equipment damage,” said Bernard Chukwulebe, Group Manager, Processing and Control, and Digital Transformation Cluster Leader, ArcelorMittal Global R&D East Chicago Center. “Combining Falkonry’s expertise in AI and analytics and our steel manufacturing domain experience, we are confident of developing a solution that will help reduce downtimes and other operational issues resulting from strip breaks.” According to Thomas Brennan, CRM Process Technology Area Manager at AM/NS Calvert, “High-speed strip breaks are the most damaging for the mill and Falkonry AI will especially be beneficial in providing early warning that can help us activate our strip break responses in time to reduce our yield losses.”