IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO.
3, MAY 2011
A Two-Stage Online Prediction Method for a Blast
Furnace Gas System and Its Application
Jun Zhao, Wei Wang, Ying Liu, and Witold Pedrycz, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—The byproduct gas in steel industry is one of the most
significant energy resources of an enterprise. Due to the large quan-
tity of yield, fluctuation, and various categories of users encoun-
tered in a blast furnace gas (BFG) system, it is very difficult to ac-
curately predict the amount of gas to be generated and forecast the
users’ consumption demand. In this paper, a two-stage online pre-
diction method based on an improved echo state network (ESN) is
proposed to realize forecasting in the BFG system. In this method,
one completes the prediction realized at the levels of BFG genera-
tion and consumption using a class of ESN with input compensa-
tion and parameter optimization. At the second stage, to predict
gas holder level of the BFG system, the energy flows being pre-
dicted at the first stage are denoised, and their correlation with the
holder level are determined by using a concept of grey correlation
with time delay. Then the effect factors exhibiting high correlation
levels are extracted to construct the model of the gas holder. The
prediction system designed in this manner is applied in the Energy
Center of Baosteel Co., Ltd, China. The results demonstrate that
the prediction system exhibits high accuracy and can provide an
effective guidance for balancing and scheduling of the byproduct
energy.
Index Terms—Blast furnace gas (BFG) system, empirical mode
decomposition (EMD) filtering, grey correlation, improved echo
state network (ESN), time series prediction.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE energy resource related prediction and control have
become a noticeable research field [1]–[4]. Blast furnace
gas (BFG) is a key byproduct in iron and steel production
process, which is also an important secondary fuel for coking,
reheat furnace, power plant, heat treatment and others. The
reasonable utilization of BFG exhibits a direct relationship with
the decrease of energy waste and production costs. In practice,
its level of generation as well as the consumption demand ex-
hibit significant and frequent fluctuations related to production
states. Furthermore, the abrupt BFG surplus or its shortage
may easily lead to the energy waste or equipment breakdown
[2]. Therefore, a reliable prediction of BFG flow can provide a
sound guidance as to the utilization and allocation of the energy
Manuscript received March 15, 2010; accepted May 18, 2010. Manuscript
received in final form May 24, 2010. Date of publication June 28, 2010; date of
current version April 15, 2011. Recommended by Associate Editor S.-L. Jámsá-
Jounela. This work was supported by the National High-Tech R&D Program of
China (2007AA04Z1A9).
J. Zhao, W. Wang, and Y. Liu are with the Research Center of Information
and Control, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116023, China (e-mail:
zhaoj@dlut.edu.cn; wangwei@dlut.edu.cn; liuying8227@163.com).
W. Pedrycz is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G7, Canada and also with Sys-
tems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw 01-447, Poland
(e-mail: pedrycz@ee.ualberta.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2010.2051545
1063-6536/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
507
in order to reduce a negative environmental impact and improve
the abilities to save energy while sustaining production safety.
Nowadays, in most of steel enterprises, the manual predic-
tion based on human experience is widely used in the evalua-
tion of the BFG level. Since such generation is a highly com-
plex chemical process for which it very difficult to establish
a sound model, along with the prediction realized by humans,
the prediction accuracy is largely influenced. Although some re-
search on byproduct energy in steel corporations has been car-
ried out, these studies were mainly focused on the optimal al-
location and planning of the byproduct. For instance, an op-
timal assignment for gas balance was constructed in [2]. The
authors proposed an adjustment mechanism based on mixed in-
teger linear programming (MILP), with intent of a reasonable
usage of the byproduct and reducing energy waste. The resulting
solution was concerned with controlling the holder level through
punishing the situations of gas shortage or its surplus. A certain
scheme of gas utilization of internal power plant based on the
MILP method was presented in [3]. The discussed application
was implemented in Kawasaki Steel Corporation, where a re-
markable effectiveness of the scheme was reported. The MILP
model to produce an effective gas assignment for Tata Corpora-
tion, India, which considered the maximal production profit as
the objective was presented in [4]. The research being reported
so far was mainly concentrated on energy scheme concerning
a middle or long term planning, which exhibited a low demand
on the system dynamics and real time performance. The energy
management discussed in those papers might not be deemed ap-
plicable in a general setting including the one encountered in
Baosteel of China. There are a number of different approaches.
A multi-period optimization of byproduct gas using a dynamic
programming augmented by some heuristics was discussed in
[5]. A balance allocation method of byproduct gas using MILP
was presented in [6] whose objective was to minimize the gas
diffusion, maintain the stability of gas holder, and maximize the
fuel utility. However [5] and [6] brought only very limited con-
siderations as to the effect of users’ consumption on gas holder.
After all, guaranteeing the production stability is the ultimate
goal to be satisfied. In addition, the models presented in those
papers were constructed on a basis of available precise predic-
tion of the gas holder level; however such assumption about the
high quality of prediction is difficult to meet in practice.
In the study on the integrated balance and optimization of
energy system in Baosteel, China, we have found that it be-
comes important to accurately predict the amounts of genera-
tion, consumption and storage of the byproduct. Once we be-
come aware of the running trend of the energy system, the op-
timization methods such as MILP, mixed nonlinear program-
ming, heuristics and knowledge—based approaches (such as,
508 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011
Fig. 1. Structure of the BFG system in steel industry.
e.g., expert systems), can be considered. In the current pro-
duction practice being encountered in large steel corporations
around the world, the energy information management system
has been widely established to accomplish functions such as
data acquisition, monitoring, alarming, and generation of data
statistics. However, with regard to estimation of flow amounts
of generation and consumption, any approximation based on
human experience and being still quite commonly utilized, often
brings about a low accuracy of the resulting estimation.
In this paper, a prediction of a significant byproduct in steel
industry, the BFG, is studied. As we have already noted, this
byproduct exhibits a large fluctuation; there are a large number
of users, complicated pipeline networks, and a high diffusion
ratio. Since it is difficult to build a physical model, we con-
sider here a prediction scheme based upon the use of time se-
ries. At the first stage, the amount of generated BFG and its re-
lated consumption demand of users are predicted, in which an
improved echo state network (ESN) is introduced as an under-
lying model. The parameters of the ESN are optimized online by
making use of a step-variable method of the least mean squares
(LMS). At the second stage, the trend of the BFG holder level
is forecasted based on the flow of units predicted in Stage I.
We determine the correlation between the flow amount of gas
generators (or users) and the level of BFG holder by adopting
a grey correlation model. Then the BFG units (including gen-
erators and users) with high correlation values are selected to
engage in the holder level prediction. The application system
is developed and applied to the practice encountered in the En-
ergy Center of Shanghai Baosteel. The results demonstrate that
the system realizing an online prediction, exhibits a significant
improvement compared with the previous approximation based
on worker’s experience, and as such it can provide a sound guid-
ance for energy scheduling.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we describe
the underlying practical problem. The prediction measure of the
BFG generators and users is presented in Section III. The corre-
lation analysis of the gas holder level is presented in Section IV,
where a concept of grey correlation is presented. In Section V,
we offer a comprehensive suite of experiments while Section VI
presents conclusions resulting from the study.
II. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
The BFG system in steel industry is a complex multi-input
and multi-output system, which consists of blast furnaces, trans-
portation networks and a series of energy users. Considering
Baosteel as an example, the structure of the BFG system is pre-
sented in Fig. 1. Four blast furnaces viewed as the generation
units can supply into the transportation network on average 1.8
million m BFG per hour, whose calorific power is about 3200
KJ/Nm . The transportation system usually includes pipelines,
mixing stations and pressure stations. The consumption users
primarily consist of coking oven, hot rolling plant, cold rolling
plant, chemical products recovery (CPR), low pressure boiler,
and power plant. Since the hot blast stoves of blast furnace ex-
pend quite a quantity of BFG, and be continuously switched,
the generation amount flowed into transportation will frequently
fluctuate. In Baosteel, taking the overlapping of wave crests and
troughs into consideration, the variation of generation amount
may reach 500 thousand m BFG per hour, which will exhibit a
drastic impact on the whole gas system. Although the gas holder
can be treated as a buffer storage unit, its total capacity of only
300 000 m is hardly enough to completely respond to the vari-
ations present in the BFG system. Besides, there are often ab-
normal conditions occurring in the production process such as
blast reduction, user shutdown or equipment fault. Such circum-
stances also lead to the system imbalance.
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION
Fig. 2. Overall structure of the ESN.
To maintain the system stability, the scheduling workers need
to timely judge about the trend of gas holder level according to
the generation amount and consumption demand of the BFG
system, and subsequently adjust users’ demands (such as low
pressure boiler or power plant). If the flow amount cannot be
precisely determined, unreasonable adjustment might occur,
which will result in a waste of energy or an increase of produc-
tion costs.
III. PREDICTION FOR SYSTEM UNIT BASED ON THE ESN
The generated amount of BFG exhibits a strong and highly
complicated relationship with the production plan of blast fur-
naces, while the consumption flow of each user is determined
by the detailed practical scenario. For example, the consump-
tion amount of hot rolling is related to the steel grade of product,
discharge temperature, beam walking speed, equipment running
status, etc. Depending on the large number of historical produc-
tion data, time series-based prediction arises as a viable mod-
eling alternative.
A. ESN Prediction Based on Time Series
We have witnessed a significant number of prediction models
such as radial basis function neural networks [7], support vector
machines [8], and recurrent neural networks [9], to name the
most representative examples. ESN is a class of recurrent neural
network that exhibits several significant differences in compar-
ison to some generic neural networks. Sound prediction capa-
bilities of ESN when applied to some chaotic time series have
been reported in [10].
As illustrated in Fig. 2, the ESN consists of an input layer,
dynamical reservoir (DR) and an output layer. The number of
input units is equal to ; the number of neurons in the DR is
while the size of the output layer is equal to . At the th step,
the input is , the states of
509
DR is , and the output is
. is the connection ma-
trix describing the relationships between the elements located
in the input and DR. is the weight matrix of the neurons in
DR. To provide proper memorization capabilities, is a sparse
matrix whose connectivity level is 1%–5% and the spectral ra-
dius is less than 1. denotes the feedback weight matrix
consisting of connections between the connecting output layer
and DR; denotes the output weight. The recursive relation
governing the ESN is described as follows:
(1)
(2)
where is the activation function of the neurons in DR
and is the corresponding function for output layer. In the
process of building the ESN model, , , and are
determined during the initialization phase, and the matrix
is formed through the network learning, see [11].
B. An Improved Version of the ESN
Although the parameters of the ESN such as , and
may be initialized randomly in the phase of the network
design, we find that for the different modeling problem in in-
dustry, the dynamics of ESN calls for quite different require-
ments, which mainly depends not only on the spectral radius and
the sparsity level of , but the inputs of the network as well.
Certainly, the expert experience can be employed to decide upon
the values of these parameters, but such approach might result
in a low quality of the resulting prediction. A systematic method
to select both input variables and the level of connectivity avail-
able through a feedforward neural network with a single hidden
layer was presented in [12]. A successful industrial application
of this method was reported in [13]. In this study, we consider
510 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011
an improved version of the ESN to be used for prediction of
various BFG units. We add a compensation signal to serve as a
certain input in order to eliminate the impact coming from input
noise. The corresponding recurrent expression reads as follows:
(3)
where is the input compensatory signal, and are the
proportionality coefficients of the DR states and the output
feedback, respectively. These parameters are optimized online
during the design of the model. To ensure the effectiveness of
the learning, a step-variable LMS algorithm is used to optimize
the parameters of the network. Here, the error and the
squared error are described as follows:
(4)
If we consider to be a linear activation function, then the
optimization process can be realized as
(5)
(6)
(7)
Expression (5) serves as an update rule for the three param-
eters of the network, where denotes , , and . The vari-
able step update is realized by means of (6), where de-
notes the length of the th step. Here and denote the cor-
responding coefficients. During the initial iterations, the step
length is made fairly large, which promotes a rapid, yet quite
rough search to move to the most promising region of the search
space. In the sequel, this length is gradually decreased. Expres-
sion (7) offers the computational details regarding , Gas holder level is an important index of the entire BFG
where . Combining (1) and (2), we obtain
(8)
(9)
(10)
where (8)–(10) form the essence of the iterative optimization for
. In this study, we assume that , and the
activation function is specified as . In this case, the
corresponding derivative reads as
(11)
C. Unit Prediction
Using the improved version of the ESN, the prediction is re-
alized in the following fashion.
Step 1) Initiate the parameters of the ESN including
matrices of connections , , , set up
an initial state of DR, , and the values of the
parameters , , and .
Step 2) Input a training sample to update the DR using (3).
Step 3) Determine the states of DR, the sample input vector
and the output vector, and check whether the
requirement on the specified number of samples for
calculating has been satisfied. If so, calculate
using (2); otherwise go back to Step 2.
Step 4) Input a sample data, calculate the output using (2)
and (3), and obtain the value of error .
Step 5) Calculate the gradient for each optimized
parameters.
Step 6) Calculate the current step length of the LMS by (6),
and update the parameter value with the use of (5)
and .
Step 7) Check the convergence of the learning process. If
the convergence has been achieved, go to Step 8;
otherwise go to Step 4.
Step 8) The training has been completed. The prediction
can be carried out using (2) and (3).
IV. UNIT SELECTION BASED ON A CONCEPT OF
GREY CORRELATION
system whose trend reflects whether the amount of flow is in-
sufficient or excessive. Since the holder level is directly related
to the generation amount and user expenditures, we consider the
use of some correlation techniques to realize the prediction task.
A. Denoising Based on Empirical Mode
Decomposition (EMD)
Due to the complexity and fluctuations of the production
process as well as the occurrence of detection error, noise
is often associated with the detected flow data. If using the
original flow information to predict holder level, the accuracy
of the model could be negatively impacted. To alleviate this
problem, we first denoise the predicted data based on an EMD,
and then construct the relationship between the flow amounts
of the BFG generators or users and the holder level.
The EMD was first presented by Huang [14] at NASA as a new
signal processing technique, which decomposes a multi-compo-
nent signal into several single-component signals called intrinsic
mode functions (IMFs) by stepwise filtering to reflect their phys-
ical meaning. We can observe that when using the traditional
EMD,whicheliminates small scale IMFsbeing regarded as noise,
it also tends to remove some useful information. In this study, we
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION
employ the method presented in [15], which is concerned with
adaptive denoising via the standard deviation of adjacent signals,
which still retains useful signals of small amplitude.
Step 1) Determine all local maxima and minima of the
signal, complete its cubic spline interpolation, and
calculate the average value of the envelope curve,
, then . Check whether is
an IMF. If not, repeat the above decomposition,
where the th step . Record
the first IMF as .
Step 2) Calculate . Take as the input
signal, repeat the above filtering process presented
in Step 1 until the remaining component is a
monotonic function or less than a given value.
Then IMFs and a remainder, , is expressed as
. 1.
Step 3) Select the first IMFs to be filtered by the adaptive
threshold , , where
is the standard deviation of th scale signal.
Step 4) Calculate the standard deviation of adjacent signal
of the th one, . If , then use the low pass
filter to complete denoising.
Step 5) Reconstruct the denoised IMF and the non-processed
components to achieve the flow data of BFG
units for the holder level prediction.
B. Grey Correlation Model With Time Delay
A large number of impact factors affecting the holder level
occur in the BFG system given a significant variability in the
generation and demand levels. If all these factors are used to
form the relationship between the variables of interest, then
real-time ability of the model could be negatively affected. In
this paper, we quantify the contribution of the impact factors
to the holder level online and select a few of these factors with
high correlation level. Additionally, due to the distribution of
gas pipeline network, the change of flow amounts of BFG units
may be reflected in the holder level after some time delay. To
address the problem, we propose using a concept of grey corre-
lation with time delay.
Let us recall that the fundamental idea of grey correlation is to
quantify correlation by determining a proximity level of the cor-
responding data trend [16], [17]. The essentials of the concept
are covered in the Appendix. Due to the large fluctuation and
the high time-variability present in the practical BFG system, it
is not sufficient to determine the correlation only by the stan-
dardized increments of time series as this computing does not
capture the effect of signal change rate (the comparative anal-
ysis is presented the Appendix as well). To alleviate this short-
coming, we introduce some extension of the grey correlation.
Given two time series, and
, the grey correlation for
and with delay is defined as follows:
(12)
511
where is the standardized increment of signal on time
, ;( 1, 2;
). and are the in-
crement correlation coefficient and the change rate correlation
coefficient, respectively.
, and
otherwise.
(13)
The value of the correlation coefficient may be positive or
negative depending on the sign of . When
the two signals have identical increments and change rates in a
certain time framework, then the correlation degree is equal to
Making use of the proposed grey correlation, we can select
a suitable threshold of the correlation level for all the BFG
units, and choose those with high correlation (viz. exceeding
the threshold) to predict the gas holder level.
V. SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS AND SYSTEM APPLICATION
A. Simulation Experiments
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage
approach and quantify its performance, we use the real-world
data of May, 2009 obtained from Shanghai Baosteel. The sam-
pling interval of the time series is 1 min.
1) Stage I: Flow Prediction of BFG Generators or Users:
We first apply the improved ESN to predict the flow amounts
of BFG generators or users. As for those BFG units in general
practice, their flow variation within one hour (60-min data) can
reflect the corresponding the dynamics characteristics of these
production units. Thus, we set the input dimension of the im-
proved ESN is 60. The inputs used in this prediction problem
are denoted as ,
where is the time series describing the value
of flow amounts. The 1-D output is . Several typical
BFG units, including the BFG generator #1 blast furnace, the
users #1–2 coke oven, #1 hot rolling plant, and #1 cold rolling
plant, are taken as representative examples since they usually
exhibit a significant impact on the holder level. To set up a
sound tradeoff between the dynamic memorization capacity of
the ESN and the real-time requirements of the application, the
number of nodes in the DR is set to 200 whereas the connec-
tivity of is set up to be 2%. In the adaptive LMS, the values
of the parameters are selected by running some preliminary set
of experiments. As a result, the value of is set to 0.95; is set
to 0.0005, and the initial step length is equal to 0.05. Although
the variable-step LMS is relatively computationally demanding,
the prediction of all of BFG generators or users takes about 1–2
min. Considering that the sampling interval of the time series
is 1 minute and the predicted time horizon is 60 min, the time
requirements for online prediction online can be fully satisfied.
We randomly choose a series of consecutive 2000 data as the
training data, and use the predictor built on their basis for the
subsequent 60 min of data. The optimal normalized values of
512 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011

TABLE I
OPTIMAL NORMALIZED ESN PARAMETERS OF THE TYPICAL BFG UNITS

Fig. 3. Prediction results of the typical BFG generator or users (a) generation amount of #1 blast furnace, (b) consumption amount of #1–2 coke oven, (c) con-
sumption amount of #1 hot rolling plant, (d) consumption amount of #1 cold rolling plant.

the parameters of the ESN obtained by the learning process are
listed in Table I. The prediction results are shown in Fig. 3; we
note here good prediction capabilities of the model. The max-
imal relative error is always less than 5% (on average), which is
fully adequate from the practical perspective.
To further contrast the advantages of the improved ESN, we
consider four other prediction methods when carrying out the
comparative analysis, which are: 1) manual estimation coming
from scheduling workers (MAN); 2) radial basis function net-
work (RBF) reported in [7]; 3) support vector machine (SVM)
coming from [8]; and 4) a “generic” ESN. The generic version
of the ESN can be regarded as a special case of the proposed
ESN with fixed global parameters ( and ). We
randomly choose the flow data at Baosteel Co., Ltd. recorded
for May 20, 2009 to carry out a comparative analysis. The re-
sults are reported in Fig. 4. Through a quick visual inspection,
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION
Fig. 4. Comparison of prediction results produced by using four methods; see
the details in the text. (a) Generation amount of #1 blast furnace, (b) consump-
tion demand of #1–2 coke oven, (c) consumption demand of #1 hot rolling, (d)
consumption demand of #1 cold rolling.
we conclude that the proposed ESN results in the best predic-
tion performance. We use the normalized root mean square error
513
(NRMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) to quan-
tify the prediction quality
where is the number of predicted data point; is the pre-
dicted value; is the real data; denotes the variance of
the results. Going through the statistical analysis of the predic-
tion results, see Table II, it becomes apparent that the predic-
tion accuracy of the proposed method is definitely higher than
the accuracy reported when running the four other methods.
More specifically, the manual estimation based on the worker
experience gives only an approximate flow trend of the BFG
units. As anticipated, its prediction quality is the worst. The RBF
network, realizing a static input-output mapping, comes with a
large prediction error. The performance of the generic ESN (al-
though the network was able to avoid the local minima in its
training process), is negatively influenced by existing noise. On
the other hand, the proposed ESN model not only is less af-
fected by disturbances, but also adapts to the dynamics of dif-
ferent BFG units. Altogether this leads to the best prediction
results.
In order to study the impact of the global parameters on the
performance of the network and further validate the effective-
ness of the proposed method, we also selected some units to
complete the prediction as shown in Table III. Here, 100 times
independent experiments were repeated for each unit. The
results indicate that the modified ESN yields higher prediction
accuracy than those provided by the generic version of the ESN.
As mentioned above, the improved ESN comes with better
generalization capabilities given a way it has been designed.
Note that the DR can effectively memorize the information
obtained from training sample and afterwards minimize the
training error via optimizing the output weights by linear re-
gression. This way of training helps avoid local minima, which
are quite common when designing neural networks. Secondly,
the optimized global parameters of the improved ESN are
suitable for different units, which make the ESN capable of
dealing with the dynamics of the objects.
2) Stage II—Prediction for Gas Holder Level: The flow
data of the BFG units are always negatively affected by var-
ious sources of noises. For a more accurate prediction of gas
holder level, we first handle the predicted results of the system
units at Stage I by running the denoising method based on the
EMD technique. Here the amount generated by the #2 blast
furnace is taken as an example. Fig. 5 illustrates the randomly
selected flow data of a continuous section of 500 min, which
involves a high level of fluctuation. Using the EMD method,
15 decomposed IMFs and remainder are obtained as shown in
Fig. 6, where we denoise the first three IMFs using a low pass
filter, and reconstruct the signal, see Fig. 7. The obtained results
indicate that the useful information residing in the predicted
flow data is well retained.
514 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011

TABLE II
RESULTS OF PREDICTION (PREDICTION ERROR): A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

TABLE III
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PREDICTION QUALITY: GENERIC ESN AND THE PROPOSED METHOD

After removing noise, we determine the correlation between
BFG units and the holder level using the proposed grey corre-
lation model with time delay. The calculated correlation values
are listed in Table IV, where the time delay of each unit is de-
termined based on production experience expressed by experts
in the Energy Center of Baosteel. It is apparent that the amount
of the BFG generation has the highest correlation level with gas
holders, and the units with a small amount of consumption or
positioned at a long distance from the gas holder have limited in-
fluence on the holder level. We pick the BFG generators or users
whose correlation value is higher than 0.1 (those are marked by
rectangle in Table IV), as the input for gas holder level. As seen
from this table, the total number of the BFG units impacting
on the gas holder, named as impact factors, is 28; while the
number of selected units with high correlation is 20, which has
been decreased by about 30% when the correlation model is
used. Such operation largely reduces the complexity of the pre-
diction model for the gas holder and makes the method more
amenable to the online realization. As illustrated in Table III,
to the BFG generators that usually have a rapid flow variation, a
relatively large number of nodes in DR (200 nodes in this study)
becomes necessary for improving the quality of prediction. Cer-
tainly, the corresponding computational consumption is consid-
erable. While, considering the slow variation of the gas holder
compared to the BFG generators or users, its number of nodes
in DR can be reduced as long as it can appropriately describes
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION 515

TABLE IV
CORRELATION VALUES OBTAINED BY THE PROPOSED GREY CORRELATION WITH TIME DELAY

To quantify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we

carry out some comparative studies including the same methods
as discussed at stage I: 1) manual estimation; 2) RBF network;
3) SVM; and 4) ESN without grey correlation analysis. The pre-
diction results as illustrated in Fig. 8 show that the ESN without
correlation analysis performs a little better than the RBF, but its
performance deteriorates over time. As somewhat expected, the
manual estimation exhibits the worst performance. In contrast,
the proposed prediction gives the best results both for #1 and #2
gas holders. The corresponding results are covered in Table V.

Fig. 5. Generation amount of #2 blast furnace.
the dynamics of the ESN, and enhance the training efficiency
of the ESN. Therefore, we experimentally select it being equal
to 100, and the prediction results are completely acceptable and
fully meet the demands of industrial practice.
B. System Application
The developed application based on the proposed approach
has been successfully applied to the Energy Center of Baosteel.
We used C++ as the implementation language and the system
runs on an IBM P_SERIES server. The graphic user interfaces
are developed using Visual C# language, and the background
database using Oracle 10 g acquires the flow data of each unit via
a real-time database called iHistorian available on the SCADA
system. The original sampling interval of SCADA is 3 sec-
onds, which is too short for the required prediction task. We
pre-process the original data in advance to yield mean values
516 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011
Fig. 6. Results of EMD for generation flow by #2 blast furnace.
Fig. 7. Reconstructed signal after EMD denoising.
of the time series reported in successive 1-min time intervals.
Fig. 9 displays an overall structure of the application, in which
the human-machine coordination is adopted to further enhance
the flexibility of the system. Fig. 10 offers a snapshot of the in-
terface: here the results of prediction are shown vis-à-vis the
practical data. The vertical line in the chart points at the current
time moment.
The developed software system has been given a high evalua-
tion from the scheduling experts at Baosteel. Using this system,
the scheduling workers can precisely and timely forecast the
running circumstances of the BFG system of the entire enter-
prise, which provides a useful decision support platform to the
byproduct energy balance and scheduling.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a trend prediction technique for
the BFG system in steel industry, which constitutes an effec-
tive attempt to solve the important online prediction for the flow
amounts of the BFG generators, users and gas holder. The ap-
proach uses the mechanisms of time series analysis and the con-
cept of grey correlation. The proposed model exhibits good per-
formance, which is visible not only in simulation studies but
also in practical applications. The effectiveness of the system
run at Baosteel can greatly improve the energy prediction level,
as well as provide an effective guidance for the decision making
in energy utilization and scheduling.
On the other hand, some theoretical improvements related to
the design presented in this paper deserve further studies. First,
when developing the ESN model, the choice of the scale of DR,
the level of connectivity, and the spectral radius were selected
through intensive experimentation. While this is a practically
viable option, in the future it would be beneficial to carry out
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION 517

Fig. 8. Prediction results of gas holder level by four methods: (a) #1 gas holder level and (b) #2 gas holder level.

some theoretical analysis that may lead to establishing some ap-
proximate values (or ranges of parameters) of such parameters.
For example, the method by Saxén and Pettersson [12] might be
considered here as a useful optimization alternative. Second, the
iterative prediction applied in the proposed ESN, which might
lead to error accumulation when predicting over a longer time
horizon, may require more attention and further improvements.
APPENDIX
GREY CORRELATION MODEL
The grey system theory is concerned with the study of
unascertained problems with few data and/or poor information.
In control theory, the darkness of colors is commonly used to
indicate the degree of clarity (transparency or availability) of
information. One of the most well accepted representations is
a so-called “black box” paradigm, which stands for an object
with its internal relations or structure totally unknown to the
investigator. We use the term “black” to represent unknown
information, “white” for completely known information, and
“grey” for the information which is only partially known.
Accordingly, the systems of this nature are referred to as
grey systems, cf. [16]. With modeling based on the use of a
small amount of data, grey systems theory is concerned with
problems of uncertainty due to small samples and/or poor and
incomplete information.
Grey correlation analysis comes as a part of this theory.
The essence of the underlying concept can be outlined
as follows. Given are two sequences of data, a so-called
518 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 3, MAY 2011

TABLE V
RESULTS OF COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS FOR HOLDER LEVEL PREDICTION

Fig. 9. Functional structure of the developed BFG prediction system.

reference series, ; and a grey correlation coefficient on time reads as follows:

series to be compared: . The
grey correlation degree of these two series denoted here by
, where
is the correlation coefficient associated with is expressed in (A.2)
the form where ; ( 1,
2; ), and
is the sign of the correlation coef-
ficient. When , then , which
means and have equal incremental direction at ;
namely, positive correlation. When ,
(A.1) and exhibit negative correlation.
A brief example serves here as an illustration.
where , and Consider four time series, where is the refer-
. The degree of grey correlation ence series, and – are the comparative se-
can be viewed as a certain similarity indicator of the ries: ,
pattern and . If , then exhibits ,
stronger resemblance to the reference than . , and .
Given that the calculations of the grey correlation might be Following the calculations presented above, we ob-
affected by some local minima or maxima of the sequence data, tain , and
a certain improvement had been proposed in [18]. Consider . Hence the value of the grey correlation
two time series, and sequence is .
, the grey correlation of the two se- In this paper, to highlight the applicability of the newly pro-
quences is , where is the posed grey correlation model in the setting of the BFG system of
ZHAO et al.: TWO-STAGE ONLINE PREDICTION METHOD FOR A BLAST FURNACE GAS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION
Fig. 10. Typical software interface of the developed system.
TABLE VI
COMPARATIVE RESULTS BY THE PROPOSED AND THE GENERIC GREY
CORRELATION
steel plant, we provide some comparative analysis whose results
are reported in Table VI. In these experiments, we randomly use
a sequence of 300 successive time series data to calculate their
grey correlation level with the gas holder. It is evident that by
the proposed correlation, the generation amount of blast furnace
has the highest impact on the gas holder level. The hot rolling is
rather lower than the generation amount, but somewhat higher
than the cold rolling consumption demand. This result is in ac-
cordance with the experience conveyed by the practitioners and
in agreement with the industrial practice. In contrast, the result
produced by the generic correlation is relatively unreasonable,
as indicated that the Hot Rolling unit has the largest correlation
with the gas holder level. Although the correlation determined
as in [18] identifies the generation amount of blast furnace as the
most visible impact factor, the difference between Hot Rolling
and Cold Rolling is not definite enough after all the consumption
amounts of the two BFG users in practice have a fairly obvious
difference in fluctuation range. Overall, one can conclude that
the proposed grey correlation offers a sound way to evaluate the
impact level on the gas holder level.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and
the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and con-
structive suggestions, which have improved the presentation of
this paper. The cooperation of Energy Center of Shanghai Baos-
teel Co. Ltd, China is greatly appreciated.
519
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Jun Zhao received the B.S. degree in control theory
from Dalian Jiaotong University, Dalian, China, and
the Ph.D. degree in engineering from Dalian Univer-
sity of Technology, Dalian, China, in 2003 and 2008,
respectively.
He is currently an Assistant Professor with the
Research Center of Information and Control, Dalian
University of Technology. His research interest
covers industrial production scheduling, computer
integrated manufacturing, intelligent optimization,
and machine learning.
Wei Wang received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees
from Northeastern University, Evanston, IL, in 1982,
1986, and 1988, respectively, all in industrial automa-
tion.
He is currently a Professor with the Research
Center of Information and Control, Dalian Univer-
sity of Technology, Dalian, China. Previously, he
was a post-doctor with the Division of Engineering
Cybernetics, Norwegian Science and Technology
University during 1990–1992, Professor and Vice
Director of the National Engineering Research
Center of Metallurgical Automation of China during 1995–1999, and a
Research Fellow with the Department of Engineering Science, University
of Oxford during 1998–1999. His research interest covers adaptive control,
computer integrated manufacturing, and computer control of industrial process.
Ying Liu received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, in
2004 and 2010, respectively.
She currently holds a Post-Doctoral position with
the Department of Control Science and Engineering,
Dalian University of Technology. Her research
interest covers integrated production planning and
scheduling, system simulation and modeling, intel-
ligent optimization and application, and artificial
neural network.
Witold Pedrycz (M’88–SM’90–F’99) is a Professor
and Canada Research Chair (CRC—Computational
Intelligence) with the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada. He is also with the Sys-
tems Research Institute of the Polish Academy
of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. His main research
directions involve computational Intelligence, fuzzy
modeling and granular computing, knowledge
discovery and data mining, fuzzy control, pattern
recognition, knowledge-based neural networks,
relational computing, and software engineering. He is also an author of 14
research monographs covering various aspects of computational intelligence
and software engineering.
Dr. Pedrycz is intensively involved in editorial activities. He is an Editor-in-
Chief of Information Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A. He currently serves as an Asso-
ciate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS and a number of other
international journals.