EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

At Davos 2019, the World Economic Forum welcomed POSCO as ‘Lighthouse Factories’ for spearheading innovation in manufacturing. POSCO is the first South Korean company to receive such recognition, through its smart-factory platform to drive productivity and quality improvements in the steel industry.

POSCO has leveraged artificial intelligence to drive productivity and quality improvements in the steel industry and built its own smart-factory platform through a collaboration with a local ecosystem of academia, SMEs and start-ups. POSCO’s capacity to manufacture top quality products is due to the combination of veteran knowledge and new technology – with 50-year operation under its belt, the company abounds in the industry knowledge, on top of which POSCO’s nimble adaptation of cutting-edge technology such as IoT, AI, and the Big Data continues taking the company forward. For example, POSCO utilized AI technology in the field such as smart blast furnace, AI based coating weight control, etc.

POSCO has established three data centers as a data infrastructures (Po-hang, Gwang-yang, and Chungn-ju) until 2020, and now putting great interest in the propelling of integrated manufacturing in various degrees of the firm's production phase. For a material quality design of steel products, POSCO has started to utilize AI technology to meet various quality requirements of steel products from customers . The formation of networks utilizing IoT on all equipments and facilities can drastically increase production efficiency. The massive amount of data that integrated manufacturing offers enables a real-time diagnosis of all equipment and production environment and is a viable option in coping with the limitations of individual equipment optimization. The expected return of last year's 600 smart projects is an estimated value of 170 million euros.