In: Control Engineering Practice, Vol. 3, No. 10, pages 1359-1371. 1995.
Abstract: In this paper a soaking pit/rolling mill process model is developed for a real industrial steel mill based on extended colored Petri nets (ECPN). Both the discrete events and the continuous dynamics involved in the process are modeled in a unified framework, allowing better investigation of the interactions between these two parts. Corresponding ECPN diagrams are given for the critical components involved in the soaking pit/rolling mill process, including the arrival of hot ingots, the charging and discharging of soaking pits, the soaking process, the preheat furnace operation, the mill operation, etc. The ECPN diagrams are implemented in the Design/CPN environment in a Sun SPARC workstation. Computer simulations are carried out and typical results are shown, which are helpful for the improvement of soaking pit/rolling mill operations.
Keywords: colored Petri nets, mixed-mode systems, simulation methods, steel manufacturing.