Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461
DOI 10.1007/s00521-015-1951-7
REVIEW
Modeling of the hot metal silicon content in blast furnace using
support vector machine optimized by an improved particle swarm
optimizer
Xia Xu1 • Changchun Hua1 • Yinggan Tang1 • Xinping Guan1
Received: 4 October 2014 / Accepted: 5 June 2015 / Published online: 23 June 2015
 The Natural Computing Applications Forum 2015
Abstract As a highly complex multi-input and multi-output
system, blast furnace plays an important role in industrial
development. Although much research has been done in the past
few decades, there still exist many problems to be solved, such
as the modeling problem. This paper adopts support vector
regression (SVR) to construct the prediction model of blast
furnace silicon content. To ensure a good generalization per-
formance for the given datasets, it is important to select proper
parameters for SVR. In view of this problem, a new particle
swarm optimizer called DMS-PSO-CLS is presented to opti-
mize the parameters of SVR. In DMS-PSO-CLS, a new coop-
erative learning strategy is hybridized with DMS-PSO, which
makes particle information be used more effectively for gener-
ating better-quality solutions. DMS-PSO-CLS takes merits of
the DMS-PSO and the cooperative learning strategy so that both
the convergence speed and the convergence precision can be
improved. Experimental results show that DMS-PSO-CLS can
find the optimal parameters of SVR with high speed and the
SVR model optimized by DMS-PSO-CLS can achieve a good
regression precision on the predictive problem of blast furnace.
Keywords Blast furnace  Hot metal silicon content 
Support vector regression  Particle swarm optimizer
1 Introduction
Iron and steel making, a typical high-energy-consuming,
high-emission and high-pollution industry, is a pillar
industry for Chinese national economy. Among all the
& Xia Xu
xuxiajnz@163.com
1
Institute of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University,
Qinhuangdao 066004, China
processes, blast furnace is the major source of sulfur
dioxide emissions and energy consumptions. It is a com-
plex industrial reactor used to produce hot metal from iron
ore for subsequent processing into steel. When a blast
furnace runs, most chemical reactions happen among dif-
ferent phases including gas phase, liquid phase and solid
phase, along with high temperature and high pressure [1].
This leads to large time delay in reaction process and
spatiotemporal characteristics, such as it will take about
6–8 h for a cycle of iron-making [2]. Due to the compli-
cated process and hostile environment, current study
focuses on multi-fields, such as modeling, control method,
performance optimizing and metallurgical analysis [3].
Researches show that modeling of blast furnace often
means modeling of its thermal state since the thermal state
represents the hot metal quality and energy utilization state.
The silicon content in hot metal has a linear approximation
relation with the thermal state. Thus, a great deal of data-
driven models have been developed and used to predict the
hot metal silicon content since the modeling process needs
only a large set of observations but not prior information
about the process. Neural networks [4–6], fuzzy logic [7],
support vector regression [8, 9], state space [10, 11], partial
least squares recursive analysis [12] and evolutionary net-
works [13, 14] have been successfully applied to predict
the silicon content.
The support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful tool for
document classifications and pattern recognitions since it is
proposed. Its main idea is to embed the inputs into a feature
space through a high-dimension mapping, so that an opti-
mal decision hyperplane can be found among the high-di-
mension embedded data points [15]. In order to find a
decision rule with good generalization capability, the so-
called support vectors (SVs), including a small subset of the
training data, are selected to support the optimal hyperplane
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1452
[16]. SVM can overcome the overfitting problem and
achieve enhanced generalization performance by minimiz-
ing the structural risk instead of the empirical risk. Support
vector regression (SVR) is later exploited to cope with the
regression estimation and function approximation prob-
lems. SVR has shown breakthroughs and excellent perfor-
mance in many areas [17–21]. Since the quality of SVR
models depends on a proper setting of SVR parameters, the
key issue for applying SVR is how to set its parameters.
Existing sources on SVR have given some suggestions on
appropriate setting of SVM parameters [22, 23].
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population-
based stochastic optimization algorithm which was origi-
nally introduced by Eberhart and Kennedy [24]. PSO is
considered to be a robust algorithm in many applications,
and a number of PSO variants have been developed [25,
26]. Multi-swarm technique has attracted increasing
attention during the last decade. It is one of the effective
approaches maintaining diversity of swarm [27–29]. In
[30], a dynamic multi-swarm particle swarm optimizer
(DMS-PSO) is introduced through dividing the whole
population into many small sub-swarms. These sub-swarms
are regrouped frequently using a certain regrouping
schedule, so that particle information can be exchanged
among the sub-swarms. However, the frequent regrouping
operation results in the deficiency of exploitation. To
overcome this drawback, we hybridize DMS-PSO with a
new cooperative learning strategy here, which can be
called DMS-PSO-CLS. The new strategy makes more
particle information be exchanged among sub-swarms,
which is not limited to the regrouping operation. Based on
this, a good balance between the local exploitation and the
global exploration can be achieved.
In this paper, the proposed DMS-PSO-CLS is used to
search the optimal parameters for SVR. Then, the predic-
tion model of hot metal silicon content in blast furnace can
be established using the DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR.
This paper is organized as follows: In Sect. 2, the iron-
making process of blast furnace is presented. This is fol-
lowed by a brief review of SVR for the modeling process in
Sect. 3. The DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR is described in
Sect. 4. Application and validation of the proposed pre-
diction model, and the detailed analysis about the experi-
mental results are presented in Sect. 5. Finally, conclusions
are presented in Sect. 6.
2 Blast furnace iron-making process
Blast furnace smelting process is a complex dynamic non-
linear process, which has been used as a benchmark problem
for black-box analysis. Figure 1 presents a typical schematic
diagram of blast furnace. The end products including molten
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Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461
iron and slag are tapped periodically from the bottom.
Meanwhile, flue gases exit from the top of the furnace.
During the process, iron ores pretreated by agglomera-
tion into sinter or pellets are fed into the top and charged in
alternate layer with coke. Preheated compressed air toge-
ther with pulverized coal is injected lower down through
tuyeres which are just above the tapholes. The gases ascend
through the charge and reduce the iron oxides to a metallic
phase and a slag phase. The oxygen in iron oxides is
removed by a series of chemical reactions. These reactions
occur as follows:
3Fe2 O3 þ CO ! 2Fe3 O4 þ CO2 ; begins at 450  C
Fe3 O4 þ CO ! 3FeO þ CO2 ; begins at 600  C
FeO þ CO ! Fe þ CO2 or FeO þ C ! Fe þ CO;
begins at 700  C or higher
The iron oxides go through these purifying reactions and
finally trickle as liquid iron through the coke to the bottom of
the furnace. At the same time, the coke descends to the
bottom of the furnace to the level where the preheated air or
hot blast enters the blast furnace. The coke is ignited by this
hot blast and immediately reacts to generate heat as follows:
C þ O2 ! CO2 þ Heat
Since the reaction takes place in the presence of excess
carbon at a high temperature, the carbon dioxide is reduced
to carbon monoxide as follows:
CO2 þ C ! 2CO
The product of this reaction, carbon monoxide, is necessary
to reduce the iron ore as seen in the previous iron oxide
reactions. The limestone descends in the blast furnace and
remains solid while going through its first reaction as
follows:
CaCO3 ! CaO þ CO2
This reaction requires energy and starts at about 875 C.
The CaO formed from this reaction is used to remove
sulfur from the iron which is necessary before the hot metal
becomes steel. This sulfur-removing reaction is
FeS þ CaO ! CaS þ FeO
CaO þ SiO2 ! CaSiO3
The reactant becomes part of the slag. The slag is also
formed from the remaining silica (SiO2 ), alumina (Al2 O3 ),
magnesia (MgO) or calcia (CaO) that entered with the iron
ore, pellets, sinter or coke. The liquid slag then trickles
through the coke bed to the bottom of the furnace. It floats
on the top of the liquid iron since it is less dense. The
desired final product, liquid hot metal, is produced at the
same time, which is further processed to produce steel or
other alloys [31].
Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of
blast furnace
Hot metal temperature is the most important sign to
judge the thermal state of blast furnace, which can be
evaluated from some measurable indicators. Among these
indicators, silicon content in hot metal is identified as the
most important one. It has been shown that silicon content
has a linear approximation relation with the thermal state
[2]. The control of a blast furnace system often means to
control the hot metal temperature and silicon content. Thus,
modeling of silicon content is crucial for blast furnace.
3 Support vector regression
SVR is to construct a so-called optimal separating hyper-
plane in a high-dimensional (even infinite-dimensional)
feature space by maximizing the margin among the nearest
training data points [8]. The selection of kernel function
and homologous kernel parameters is very important for
the accuracy of predictive results. Among various types of
support vector regression, the most commonly used is e-
SVR which finds a regression hyperplane with an e-in-
sensitive band. For convenience, in the sequel, the term
SVR is used to stand for e-SVR.
1453
For a given training set D ¼ fðxi ; yi Þ; i ¼ 1; . . .; ng,
where xi is the ith input vector, yi is the corresponding
output and n is the total number of exemplars. We consider
the case can be written as a nonlinear mapping as follows:
f ðxÞ ¼ wT uðxÞ þ b ð1Þ
where uðxÞ maps data points xi into a higher-dimensional
space. In SVR, the goal is to find a function f ðxÞ that has at
most e deviation from the actually obtained output yi .
The objective function and constraints for e-SVR can be
described as follows, so that the data which lie outside the
e-insensitive band are penalized.
X n 
1 
min k w k2 þC ni þ ni
w;b 2
i¼1
8
T ð2Þ
< yi  ðw  uðxi Þ þ bÞ 6 e þ ni
>
T
s:t: w  uðxi Þ þ b  yi 6 e þ ni 
>
:
ni ; ni > 0; i ¼ 1; . . .; n
where C [ 0 is the parameter which gives a trade-off
between the model complexity and training error, e [ 0
controls the admissible uncertainty on the data points,
ni and ni are slack variables, ni denotes the training error
above e, whereas ni denotes the training error below e.
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1454 Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461

To solve Eq. (2), Lagrange multiplier method can be The process can be converted into a mathematical
used with turning the Lagrange into the following dual form: problem as follows. Suppose that sz particles are used to
Xn   X
n   search the solution. The ith particle in the D-dimensional

max
y a
i i þ a i  e ai þ ai space is represented as xi ¼ ðx1i ; x2i ; . . .; xdi ; . . .; xDi Þ, where
a;a
i¼1 i¼1
xdi 2 ½xmin ; xmax , d 2 ½1; D. The velocity corresponding to
1X n X n     
the ith particle is vi ¼ ðv1i ; v2i ; . . .; vdi ; . . .; vD
 ai  ai ai  ai K xi ; xj i Þ, where
2 i¼1 j¼1 d
vi 2 ½vmin ; vmax . The velocity and location of the ith par-
8P n   ð3Þ
> ticle are updated through the formula below:
>
> ai  ai ¼ 0
>
>
< j¼1 vdi vdi þ c1  rand1di  ðpbestid  xdi Þ þ c2  rand2di
s:t: 0 6 ai 6 C  ðgbestd  xdi Þ ð5Þ
>
>
>
> 0 6 ai 6 C
>
: xdi ¼ xdi þ vdi ð6Þ
i ¼ 1; . . .; n
  where c1 and c2 are the acceleration constants. c1 repre-
where ai and ai are Lagrange multipliers and K xi ; xj is a
sents the weight that the ith particle tracks its own histor-
kernel function which can be chosen from the following
ical optimum value pbesti . c2 represents the weight that the
functions:
ith particle tracks the whole group’s optimum value gbest.
• Gaussian radial basis function (GRBF) kernel: pbesti and gbest are updated all the time according to each
 0  particle’s fitness value. rand1di and rand2di are two random
kx  x k2
kðx; x0 Þ ¼ exp ; variables in the range [0, 1].
2r2
To control the flying velocity, an inertia weight or
• Polynomial kernel: a constriction factor is introduced by Shi and Eberhart
q [33] as
kðx; x0 Þ ¼ ð1 þ hx; x0 iÞ ;
vdi w  vdi þ c1  rand1di  ðpbestid  xdi Þ
• Sigmoid kernel: ð7Þ
0 0
þ c2  rand2di  ðgbestd  xdi Þ
kðx; x Þ ¼ tanhðahx; x i þ cÞ:
where w usually decreases linearly from 0.9 to 0.4 during
where r; q; a; c are the adjustable parameters of the above the iterative process [34].
kernel functions. The Gaussian radial basis function kernel Substantially, PSO is divided into two versions. The
is used here. above formula is global PSO, and another version is local
By applying the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker theorem, the PSO. For local PSO, each particle adjusts its position and
above constrained optimization problem can be solved velocity according to its historical best position pbesti and
[32]. Finally, the regression hyperplane for the underlying the best position achieved so far from its group lbesti . The
regression problem can be given by velocity update strategy is described as follows:
X 
f ðxÞ ¼ aþ 
i  ai kðx; xi Þ þ b

ð4Þ vdi w  vdi þ c1  rand1di  ðpbestid  xdi Þ
ð8Þ
xi 2SV þ c2  rand2di  ðlbestid  xdi Þ
P  
where b ¼ yi þ e  xi 2SV aþ 
i  ai kðx; xi Þ and SV
represents the small set of support vectors with aþ  4.2 DMS-PSO-CLS
i  ai 6¼ 0.

DMS-PSO is a local version of PSO with a new neighbor-

4 The prediction model based on DMS-PSO-CLS
4.1 Principle of particle swarm optimizer
In particle swarm optimizer, potential solution of the
optimization problem is imagined as a point in D-dimen-
sional space. Each particle has a velocity vector to deter-
mine its direction and a fitness value to measure the
corresponding optimization state. The position and velocity
in the D-dimensional search space are adjusted according
to the current optimum particle.
hood topology. The population is divided into some small-
sized sub-swarms. They search for better positions in the
search space using their own members. The sub-swarms are
dynamic and regrouped frequently through a regrouping
schedule, which is equivalent to a periodic exchange of
particle information. Particles from different sub-swarms
are regrouped to a new configuration through the random
regrouping operation. In this way, the search space of each
small sub-swarm is expanded and better solutions are pos-
sible to be found by the new small sub-swarms [27]. The
regrouping process is shown in Fig. 2 [28].

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Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461 1455

Although DMS-PSO can solve problems efficiently,
there still exist some drawbacks. In DMS-PSO, each par-
ticle in a sub-swarm only learns from its pbest and lbest.
Information among different sub-swarms cannot be
exchanged until the population is regrouped. Due to the
deficiency of cooperative learning among sub-swarms, even
Regroup
Fig. 2 DMS-PSO’s search process
though the globally optimal region is found, the particles
cannot converge rapidly to the globally optimal solution.
DMS-PSO achieves great improvement on global explo-
ration but lacks local exploitation. Aiming at this drawback,
a new cooperative learning strategy is integrated with DMS-
PSO, which can be called DMS-PSO-CLS. It is used to
exchange particle information among different sub-swarms
sufficiently. In this way, the collaborative learning among
sub-swarms is enhanced and the balance between the global
exploration and the local exploitation can be achieved. The
cooperative learning procedure is described as follows:
1. For each sub-swarm, we sort the fitness values of the
particles and select the two worst particles to be updated.
2. For each particle’s each dimension, we select two sub-
swarms randomly out of the whole groups.
3. We compare the fitness values of the two sub-swarms’
lbests and select the better one.
4. We use the winner’s lbest as the exemplar to learn
from for the corresponding dimension of the particle to
be updated.
The pseudo-code of DMS-PSO-CLS is shown in Algorithm 1.

Algorithm 1 The pseudo-code of DMS-PSO-CLS.

Initialize:
sz : size of the whole population; numregion: number of sub-swarms; R: regrouping pe-
riod; iter max : max iterations; Initialize each particle’s position xdi and velocity vid and
divide the particles into numregion sub-swarms; Initialize lbestj of each sub-swarm
according to its members.
Iterate:
1: for iter =1:0.9∗iter max do
2: for each particle xi do
3: Update each particle using Eq. (6) and Eq. (8) and revise xdi , vid using xdi =
min(xmax , max(xmin , xdi )), vid = min(vmax , max(vmin , vid ));
4: end for
5: Calculate their fitness values and update pbesti , gbest;
6: Sort fitness values of each group’s particles. Select the worst two particles lworstkj ,
k = 1, 2 and the best one particle lbestj of each sub-swarm;
7: for each lworstkj do
8: for each dimensional lworstkj (d) do
9: Select two local best particles lbest1 (d), lbest2 (d) randomly and compare their
fitness values f (lbest1 (d)), f (lbest2 (d));
10: if f (lbest1 (d)) < f (lbest2 (d)) then
11: lworstkj (d) = lbest1 (d);
12: else
13: if f (lbest1 (d)) > f (lbest2 (d)) then
14: lworstkj (d) = lbest2 (d);
15: end if
16: end if
17: end for
18: end for
19: if mod(iter,R)=0 then
20: Regroup the sub-swarms randomly;
21: end if
22: Calculate their fitness values and update lbestj ;
23: end for
24: for iter =0.9∗iter max :iter max do
25: Update each particle using global version PSO where w is changed to 0.2 and other
parameters remain the same as above;
26: end for

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1456 Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461

From Algorithm 1, DMS-PSO-CLS is divided into two

stages. We set the top 90 % of all iterations run as DMS-
PSO-CLS. The process is mostly used to conduct an
extensive search. The remaining percents of iterations run
as the global version PSO and can be explained as a tar-
geted search procedure. The experiments on proportion’s
size of the two stages will be shown in Sect. 5.
DMS-PSO-CLS can take merits of the DMS-PSO and
the cooperative learning strategy and can keep a better
diversity to develop the virgin space. With the novel
cooperative learning strategy, more information can be
exchanged among sub-swarms, so that DMS-PSO-CLS can
keep a good balance between the global exploration and the
local exploitation. Wholly speaking, DMS-PSO-CLS is a
good method to improve the ability of PSO. The experi-
ments in Sect. 5 show that DMS-PSO-CLS can perform
well on optimizing parameters of SVM.

4.3 DMS-PSO-CLS prediction model

As a typical modeling method, the capability of SVM
depends on the selected kernel function and the corre-
sponding parameters. Different kernels decide different
support vector computing, and the Gaussian radial basis
function kernel is used in this study because it is robust and
effective for a wide range of applications. Accordingly,
two parameters need to be optimized: the punishment
factor C and the width of the Gaussian function’s kernel r2 .
An optimal setting of C and r2 ensures an optimal SVR
prediction model. DMS-PSO-CLS is used to search these
two parameters here. During the selection of the two
parameters, each particle represents a feasible solution [C,
r2 ]. The objective of DMS-PSO-CLS is to minimize the
fitness value; thus, the learner with minimal fitness value
should be reserved during the optimization process.
Accordingly, the optimal parameters can be achieved,
which can bring good performance for SVR. The procedure
of the optimization procedure is shown as follows:
1. Initialize the size of particles and the maximum
iteration number;
2. Determine the input and output of the SVR prediction
model;
3. For each iteration, train SVR according to the corre-
sponding particle position and compute the corre-
sponding fitness value;
4. Update the fitness value and position of the particle
best and the global best;
5. Check if the iteration reaches the maximum iteration;
6. If the iteration is 200, the optimal parameters of SVR
are obtained. Otherwise, repeat steps (3) and (4).
The flowchart of the optimization procedure is shown in
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 Flowchart of optimizing the SVM parameters with DMS-PSO-
CLS
5 Experimental validation in blast furnace
In this section, the proposed DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR is
applied to the real data collected from the No. 2 blast
furnace of Liuzhou Steel in China. The volume of the blast
furnace is 2000 m3. There are, in total, 500 consecutive
data points with the preceding 300 data points to be the
training set and the remaining 200 data points to be the
testing set.
5.1 Experimental data and preprogressing
There are 24 candidate variables relating to the hot metal
silicon content. Some of them will selected to be the model
inputs since not all monitored process variables have
influence on the fluctuation of silicon content. Addition-
ally, too many input parameters will increase the com-
plexity of the model, while too little inputs will reduce the
model precision. Thus, it is necessary to select several
important variables as the inputs from all these listed
variables. Here, the gray correlation method is used for
variable selection [35].
The gray correlation degree is a quantitative value of the
correlation between the factors. Positive correlation between
main array and sub-array indicates that the sub-factor will
enhance the main factor. Negative correlation indicates that
the sub-factor will weaken the main factor. The higher the
value of gray correlation degree is, the more relevant the
main factor and the sub-factor are. To get the gray relational
degree and the gray relational order, the gray correlation
analysis method can be summarized as follows:

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Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461
Step 1 Get the reference X0 ¼ ðx0 ð1Þ; x0 ð2Þ; . . .; x0 ðnÞÞ
and comparison sequences
Xi ¼ ðxi ð0Þ; xi ð1Þ; . . .; xi ðnÞÞ; i ¼ 1; 2; . . .m.
Step 2 Calculate the relational degree.
To determine the relational degree between the
reference and comparison sequences, a discrete
function of the relational degree coefficient (the
gray relational coefficient) is represented by
Dmin þ qDmax
10i ðkÞ ¼ ; k ¼ 1; 2; . . .; n
D0i ðkÞ þ qDmax
where
D0i ðkÞ ¼j xi ðkÞ; x0 ðkÞ j
Dmax ¼ max maxfD0i ðkÞg
i k
Dmin ¼ min minfD0i ðkÞg
i k
and q 2 ½0; 1 is the coefficient to distinguish the
degree of proximity of X0 and Xi such that
10i 2 ½0; 1. This value can be adjusted based on
the actual system requirements. In this paper, we
consider q ¼ 0:5. After the gray relational coef-
ficients have been obtained, the mean of the
coefficients usually adopted as the gray relational
degree. Then
1X n
cðx0 ; xi Þ ¼ 1 ðkÞ
2 k¼1 0i
is called the gray correlation degree of the ith
comparison sequence Xi to the reference
sequence X0 .
Step 3 Order the gray correlation degree.
From the ordered cðx0 ; xi Þ, we shall pick the
sequence with the greater relational degree.
Table 1 lists the gray correlation degree of the 24 can-
didate variables. The variables with gray correlation degree
larger than 0.822 are selected as the inputs of the model,
which have been made bold in the table.
5.2 Data normalization
The variables of data collected from blast furnace have
different levels of magnitudes as shown in Table 1.
Therefore, all variables should be normalized to the range
[0, 1] using the following formula
xi  xmin;i
yi ¼ ð14Þ
xmax;i  xmin;i
where xi is the value of the ith dimension of the data and
xmin;i and xmax;i are the minimum and maximum of the ith
dimension of the data. The output variable should also be
1457
normalized since the values of silicon content are too
concentrated.
5.3 Parameters setting
Fitness function is a very important mark to measure the
parameters found by DMS-PSO-CLS for SVR. In this
study, it is defined as the leave-one-out cross-validation. In
addition, PSO and DMS-PSO are also used to optimize the
ð9Þ parameters of SVR. The parameters of the three algorithms
are set as follows. The population size is set at 20, the sub-
swarms 5, the maximum iteration 200, the dim 2, and
ð10Þ ranges of C and r2 are [0.1, 100] and [0.01, 1000].
ð11Þ 5.4 Performance criteria
ð12Þ
This research adopts the root mean square error (RMSE)
and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as the
criteria for assessing the prediction performance. RMSE
and MAPE are frequently used to measure the differences
between values predicted by the model and the values
actually observed. The performance criteria calculation
formulas are shown below:
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1X n
RMSE ¼ ðby  yi Þ2 ð15Þ
n i¼1 i
ð13Þ 100 % X
n
jb
y i  yi j
MAPE ¼ ð16Þ
n i¼1 yi
where yi and by i stand for the actual value and the estimated
value of the ith output, respectively.
5.5 Results and discussion
In this part, the experimental results of hot metal silicon
content are presented. All experiments are carried out using
MATLAB R2010a with 2 GB memory and the operating
system is Windows XP.
Table 2 shows the parameters optimized by the three
methods. For SVR optimized by DMS-PSO-CLS, RMSE
of the training set could achieve 0.0181; however, it can
only reach 0.0305 and 0.0321 for SVRs optimized by
DMS-PSO and PSO. The RMSE of testing set is in the
same situation. Simultaneously, the MAPE of the DMS-
PSO-CLS-based SVR is also more accurate than the
other two methods. Figures 4 and 5 present the predictive
results of the SVR optimized by DMS-PSO-CLS. Fig-
ures 6 and 7 give the regression results of the other two
SVRs for the testing data prediction results. It is
observed that the predicted hot metal silicon content of
the SVR optimized by DMS-PSO-CLS is closest to the
measured one.
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1458 Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461

Table 1 List of candidate

Symbol Variable name Unit Gray correlation degree
variables from blast furnace
[Si] n1 The latest silicon content wt% 0.882
CWF Cold wind flowrate m3/min Pa kPa 0.829
FWR Feed wind ratio kPa 0.829
HBP Hot blast pressure kPa 0.829
FTP Furnace top pressure kPa 0.83
PD Pressure difference kPa 0.828
TPBVR Top pressure blast volume ratio 0.831
GP Gas permeability m3/min Pa kPa 0.829
DC Drag coefficient cd 0.827
HBT Hot blast temperature C 0.825
OEF Oxygen enrichment flowrate m3/min Pa kPa 0.802
OEP Oxygen enrichment percentage wt% 0.803
PCI Pulverized coal injection ton 0.815
BH Blast humidity g/m 0.632
SWS Standard wind speed mm/h 0.829
AWS Actual wind speed mm/h 0.824
BM Blast momentum kg m/s 0.815
BGV Bosh gas volume m3/min 0.83
BGI Bosh gas index m3/(min m2) 0.829
TP(NE) Top temperature (northeast) C 0.819
TP(SW) Top temperature (southwest) C 0.822
TP(NW) Top temperature (northwest) C 0.82
TP(SE) Top temperature (southeast) C 0.82

Table 2 The prediction results

C r2 train_RMSE test_RMSE train_MAPE test_MAPE
of SVR models with different
methods PSO 3.328 0.650 0.0321 0.0401 0.0411 0.0598
DMS-PSO 1.354 0.588 0.0305 0.0388 0.0369 0.0565
DMS-PSO-CLS 0.699 4.588 0.0181 0.0306 0.0147 0.0400

Fig. 4 Predictive results of trainmse=0.018122

training dataset achieved by the 0.7
Hot metal silicon content (Wt%)

DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR
0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
Sample sequence

It is worth mentioning that each method is repeated 20 SVR is 100 % with 60 % for PSO-based SVR and 40 %
times independently. For the SVR optimized by DMS- for DMS-PSO-based SVR. Obviously, DMS-PSO-CLS can
PSO-CLS, there are 20 successful results with never performance stably.
missing the optimal value, but only 12 and 8 successful From Sect. 3, the proportion’s size of the two stages in
results can be achieved by SVRs optimized by PSO and DMS-PSO-CLS may be influential for the predictive per-
DMS-PSO. The success rate of the DMS-PSO-CLS-based formance. We do the experiments with different

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Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461 1459

Fig. 5 Predictive results of testmse=0.030633

0.7

Hot metal silicon content (Wt%)

testing dataset achieved by the
DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR 0.65

0.6

0.55

0.5

0.45

0.4

0.35

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Sample sequence

Fig. 6 Predictive results of testmse=0.038778

Hot mental silicon content (Wt%)

testing dataset achieved by the 0.7

DMS-PSO-based SVR 0.65

0.6

0.55

0.5

0.45

0.4

0.35

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Sample sequence

Fig. 7 Predictive results of testmse=0.040077

hot metal silicon content (Wt%)

testing dataset achieved by the 0.7

PSO-based SVR 0.65

0.6

0.55

0.5

0.45

0.4

0.35

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Sample sequence

proportions ranging from 0 to 1 with the interval of 0.1.
Finally, we found that the predictive results achieved by
different proportions are almost the same although the
proportion is 0.1. The only difference is the convergence
rate of DMS-PSO-CLS with the larger proportions the
slower convergence rate, which almost remain the same
when the proportions is [0.1, 0.8]. The results verify that
the proportion’s size of the two stages has little impact on
the performance of DMS-PSO-CLS. Figures 8, 9 and 10
present the search performance of the three heuristic
techniques. From these analysis and figures, it is clearly
seen that DMS-PSO-CLS can lead the particles to optimal
region at very fast speed without trapping into the local
optimum, while the other two methods may either fall into
the minimum or converge slowly.
From the results of comparison, it is obvious that the
DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR has better prediction accuracy
and faster convergence speed than the other two methods
and its prediction results are stable. The reason why DMS-
PSO-CLS can optimize SVR best for hot metal silicon
content is that DMS-PSO-CLS takes merits of the DMS-
PSO and the new cooperative learning strategy. With the
novel cooperative learning strategy, more information can
be exchanged among the sub-swarms. The new strategy

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1460 Neural Comput & Applic (2016) 27:1451–1461

0.155 gives the best convergence accuracy on optimizing SVR

the best fitness
the average fitness
0.15 when compared with other PSO versions but also achieves
0.145 a high convergence speed. The relative results also prove
that DMS-PSO-CLS can successfully be applied to solve
Fitness value

0.14
0.135 the industrial problem.
0.13
0.125
0.12 6 Conclusion
0.115
0.11 This paper has developed a SVR model to predict the hot
0 50 100 150 200 250
Sample sequence
metal silicon content of blast furnace, where the two
parameters of SVR are optimized by an improved opti-
Fig. 8 Variation trend of the best and average fitness values of DMS- mization algorithm which is called DMS-PSO-CLS. Sim-
PSO-CLS-based SVR ulation results show that the DMS-PSO-CLS-based SVR
has a good regression performance. We can observe that
0.15 DMS-PSO-CLS can improve the search precision and
the best fitness

0.145
the average fitness simultaneously quicken the convergence speed of DMS-
PSO. It can also be seen that the proposed new optimiza-
0.14
tion algorithm is effective in optimizing the parameters of
0.135
Fitness

SVR for the modeling of silicon content. Accordingly, it is

0.13 suitable for application to optimize problems of various
0.125 industry fields.
0.12
Acknowledgments This work is supported in part by the National
0.115
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61273260), the Specialized
0.11 Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of
0 50 100 150 200 250 China (No. 20121333120010), Natural Scientific Research Founda-
Sample sequence tion of the Higher Education Institutions of Hebei Province (No.
2010165), the Major Program of the National Natural Science
Fig. 9 Variation trend of the best and average fitness values of DMS- Foundation of China (No. 61290322) and Foundation of Key Labo-
PSO-based SVR ratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of
Education, P.R. China (No. SCIP2012008).

0.155
the best fitness
the averarge fitness
0.15
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