Title
Reinforcement learning for industrial process control: A case study in flatness control in steel industry
Abstract
Strip rolling is a typical manufacturing process, in which conventional control approaches are widely applied. Development of the control algorithms requires a mathematical expression of the process by means of the first principles or empirical models. However, it is difficult to upgrade the conventional control approaches in response to the ever-changing requirements and environmental conditions because domain knowledge of control engineering, mechanical engineering, and material science is required. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning method that can make the agent learn from interacting with the environment, thus avoiding the need for the above mentioned mathematical expression. This paper proposes a novel approach that combines ensemble learning with reinforcement learning methods for strip rolling control. Based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO), a multi-actor PPO is proposed. Each randomly initialized actor interacts with the environment in parallel, but only the experience from the actor that obtains the highest reward is used for updating the actors. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional control methods and the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods in terms of process capability and smoothness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.compind.2022.103748
COMPUTERS IN INDUSTRY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Strip rolling, Process control, Reinforcement learning, Ensemble learning
Journal
143
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0166-3615
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jifei Deng100.34
Seppo Sierla200.34
Jie Sun300.34
Valeriy Vyatkin41047152.80