Soft Sensor Modeling for Slab Temperature Estimation

Xi-Huai Wang', Shao-Yuan Liz and Yu-Geng Xi2

' Department of Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University
Shanghai 200135, China
'Department ofAutomation, Shanghai Jiaotong University
Shanghai 200030, China

Absfracf-This paper investigated a soft sensor modeling increases. So, the output of the h-th hidden neuron, zh, is a
approach based on radial basis function networks (RBFN). A radial basis function that defines a spherical receptive field in
fuzzy e-means (FCM)clustering algorithm is used to classify R" given by the following equation:
training vectors into several clusters, each cluster is trained by a
radial basis function network, and membership values are used
for combining several network outputs to obtain the final result.
In the online stage, membership values are computed using an
adaptive fuzzy clustering algorithm for the new vector. The
proposed approach has been applied to the slab temperature
estimation in a practical walking beam reheating furnace.
Simulation results show that the approach is effective. In other words, each neuron in the hidden layer has a
I. INTRODUCTION substantial finite spherical activation region, determined by
the Euclidean distance between input vector, x, and the center,
Although much progress has been made in new sensors and ch, of the function zh normalized with respect to the scaling
process-related analyzers, the commercial availability, high factor U*
reliability and low cost of instruments, which measure the From (1) we can know that each hidden neuron is
important intemal variables in online, are still very limited. associated with L+I internal parameters; the L components of
Due to these limitations, considerable attention has been vector ch that represents the L dimensional position of the
focused on the development of online soft sensor [I-31. radial function, and U, that determines the receptive field of
Soft sensor is the association of a sensor, which allow the neuron. The receptive field is the region of the input space
online measurements of some process variables, with an over which the neuron has an appreciable response. The set of
estimation approach in order to provide online estimation of hidden neurons is designed so that they cover all the
the immeasurable variables and model parameters. Several significant regions of the input vector space.
estimation techniques have been proposed in the literature, In this paper, the out layer is made up of one linear
soft sensors based on artificial neural network have been summation unit, linked to the hidden layer by weighted
recognized to have strong potential in the online estimation. connections wh. Hence the network output y is given by the
The supervision and control of the temperature distribution following equation:
of the slabs reheated in walking beam reheating furnaces of
hot rolling mill is important, but the slab temperature in the
heating process is very difficult to measure at present. In this
paper, a new radial basis function network (RBFN) soft
sensor approach based on adaptive fuzzy clustering is
presented, and has been applied to the slab temperature The RBFN has two operating modes, that is the training
estimation in a practical fumace. Simulation results show that mode and the test mode. During trainimg, the adjustable
the approach is effective. parameters of the RBFN are set so as to minimize an
objective function of the error between the actual network
11. RBFNSOFTSENSORS
USINGFUZZYCLUSTWJ" output and the desired output over the vectors in the training
The FCM clustering algorithm is used to classify training set. In the test stage, input vectors are applied, and output
objects into several clusters, each cluster is trained by a sub- vectors are produced by the network.
RBFN, and membership values are used for combining
several RBFN outputs to obtain the final result. The structure
of soft sensor is shown as Fig. I .
A . Radial Basis Function Nehvork Structure
A RBFN has a three-layer architecture with no feedback.
The input layer is made up of N nodes (dimension of the
input vector x=(x,, x , ... xJERN); their connections to the
hidden nodes are not weighted and implement a fan-out of the
input components to the hidden layer. The bidden layer
consists of H hidden neurons (radial basis units), with radial
activation functions. A typical choice for this function is the
Gaussian function, which has a peak at the center and
decreases monotonically as the distance from the center Fig. I The s"cNIe of soft sensor modeling

0-7803-781 W O 0 3 IEEE
0-5/031$17.00 1452 The IEEE lntemational Conference on F u u y Systems
 The RBFN can be trained in three steps. At first the
position of centers ch of the hidden neuron activation regions
are assigned. The second step of training process sets the
value of the scaling factor oh, that is the width of the
activation regions. The last step of training process evaluates
the weight matrix w. The training algorithm of RBFN is
described by Catelani [4].
B. Adaptive Fuzry C-Means Clustering
Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is an unsupervised
classification algorithm, which uses a certain objective
function, described in (3), for iteratively determining the local
minima.
where C i s the number of clusters, N is the number of training
objects X={K.li=l, 2, ... N). The objective function is a
weighted within-groups sum of distances dv An important
parameter in this approach is the exponent m. This exponent
is always greater than unity. The higher the exponent, the
more vague is the boundary between different clusters. If m is
equal to unity, the algorithm is changing into hard c-means
clustering.
Cluster centers are given by the following equation:
Membership values for objects are calculated using (5). An
important feature in FCM clustering is that the sum of an
object's values over all the clusters equals unity as (6).
TU$
jd
=I, u B E [0,1], V i ,j
Different types of distance measures can be used to
measure the distance between an object i and a prototypej . A
Euclidean distance is given by (7) and a Mahalanobis
distance by (8), which is used in this paper. The latter takes
also into account the correlations, as well as the different
orientations, of clusters. Euclidean distance measure:
d ~ ( X i , V j ) = ( X j - V , ) ( X i , V , ) T ,V i , j
Mahalanobis distance measure:
d i ( X j , V j )= ( X , - V , ) A J ' ( X j , V , ) ' , V i ,j
A covariance matrix, A,, can be estimated by following
equation:
Equations (3)-(9) mainly describe the formulas which are
used during the training stage. In online stage, new values of
memberships are calculated using (IO) along with the chosen
distance measure. The membership values for a new vector
is:
, Vi (10)
Equation (10) is basically a non-adaptive version of FCM
if the Prototypes are not The basic form Of an
adaptive FCM was described by Marsili-Libelli [5].
However, this adaptation rule works well only in the case
of a relatively small number of objects and for small period
of time because the effect of every new object will be added
into the summation terms S(N) and M(N). The larger the
terms are, the less adaptive is the rule.
In this paper, a modification has been used in order to
preserve the adaptation efficiency. An effect of every new
(4) object multiplied by the number of added objects times
parameter a. The value for the parameter a can be set to he
between 0.01-0.1. At first glance, the magnitude of the
parameter might appear to be relatively large. However, one
should note the use of membership values to improve the
robustness of the adaptation rule against outliers. The larger
the distance from the prototype, the smaller is the
membership value and, thus, the weight, which is to the
(5) power m. Otherwise, as the membership value is close to
unity, the effect is not too large because the distance from the
prototype is vely small or even negligible.
C. Approach of Soji Sensors
In the online stage, new values of memberships are
computed using an adaptive fuzzy clustering algorithm for
the new object. The output Y of the distributed RBFN is as
(7) (13) shows:
(8)
where 4 is the output of the j-th RBF sub-network, C is the
number of sun-networks in the distributed network, i.e. the
number of clusters of FCM.
111. SIMULATION RESEARCH
A walking beam reheating furnace of hot rolling is used to
heat steel slabs up to specified temperature required for
metallurgical quality and for hot rolling. Slabs are charged
1453 The IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems
into the furnace through the charge door, heated while being
transferred toward the discharge end, and finally extracted at 1110,
pre-scheduled intervals.
The reheating furnace that is subject to this paper is a 150
ton / hr walking beam type furnace in Liaoning Province. The
furnace can be divided in 5 individually controlled burner
zones and two recuperative zones without burners. In each
zone temperatures can be set according to the optimal control
system of the furnace.
The reheating furnace simulator has developed as the
physical model of the plant [8]. Fig. 2 shows its system
configuration. The simulator simulates actual operations,
under a given operation schedule.
The procedure of designing a soft sensor for slab
1 actualtelrperature 1
1080
temperature has three steps. First is selecting the secondary 0 20 40 60 80
measurements of the furnaces, second is collecting training Tlm (mn)
objects, and the third is soft sensor modeling for slab
temperature estimation based on the selected objects using Fig. 4 Thc result of on-line slab tcmperature estimation
RBFN with FCM. Fig. 3 shows the diagram of slab
temperature estimation based on radial basis function neural Five secondary measurements are selected to design a soft
network sensor for slab temperature estimation. They are the setting
values of temperature for five heating zones. The operation

1 Simulator Supcrvisar
Furnacc Optitpal Control Systcm
(Zone Tcmperaturc Sening)
data are collected from the furnace simulator under different
operation status. Fig. 4 is the result of on-line slab
temperature estimation using RBFN based on FCM.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a RBFN soft sensor based on adaptive
fuzzy clustering. The obtained results demonstrate that this

Information
(Size,Stocl
1 1 Slab
Extraction
soft sensor approach is of high modeling accuracy, and the
time of training is much shorter than by one neural network
because of classifying training objects into several subsets.
This approach has good generalization result and good
Grade, etc.)
Slab Tracking through UTemperahrrc
prediction accuracy, therefore, it can be used to actual
industrial process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by National Science Foundation of
Slab and Furnace Wall China (Grant No. 69934020,60074004), and Natural Science
Heat Transfer Modcl
Foundation of Shanghai Education (Grant No. 02IKOI).
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Fig. 3 The Diagram of soft sensors for slab temperature

1454 The IEEE International Conference o n Fuzzy Systems