EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

The European steel industry identified digitization as a key enabling technology not only for maintaining its world-wide leading role with respect to product quality, but also for pushing the limits and raising efficiency, reliability and quality to a next level. Recently, many steel companies updated and overhauled existing infrastructures and prepared for being “BigData-ready” and to apply “Industry 4.0” concepts. Yet, the practical work to gain benefits from the new technologies is far from being easy. Some key questions that now struggle many vendors are: How can those new technologies be applied in their current situation? How can different processes interact to make products even better? or What has to be done to achieve economic benefits from using the new digital resources? In this paper, BFI would like to provide answers for that questions: throughout several successful research projects and in strong cooperation with its partners, it developed solution strategies that range from a straightforward utilization of Big Data, to even integrating Industry 4.0 within legacy IT infrastructures. Consequently, the paper summarizes these activities and introduces a series of solution modules on how to practically apply recent advancements like Big Data technology, semantics, distributed computing and decentral optimization. The work concludes with estimates on the potential impact and advice, how the solutions can be strategically integrated in your plant.