Applications of Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence in Metallurgical Industry

Metallurgical industry is one of the most important industrial processes, which mainly consists of coking process, sintering process, ironmaking process, and casting and rolling process. All of the metallurgical processes are complex, multivariate and nonlinear systems with large time-delay. Some chemical or physical mechanisms are even not clear and uncertain. It is difficult to establish the models, design the controllers, devise the scheduling and optimization strategies, and make the operation decisions by the conventional mechanism-based methods. Nevertheless, these processes work continuously and repetitively, which produces large amounts of data, and consists of lots of knowledge and expert experiences. In the last decade, evolutionary computation and artificial intelligence (ECAI) began to be widely used in metallurgical industry and many good results were reported. This letter demonstrates how the development of ECAI impacts the metallurgical industry by analyzing some good applications of the ECAI in typical metallurgical processes and discusses the future development trends and challenges of the applications of the ECAI in metallurgical industries.