Reinforcement learning for industrial process control: A case study in flatness control in steel industry
2022 (English)In: Computers in industry (Print), ISSN 0166-3615, E-ISSN 1872-6194, Vol. 143, article id 103748Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
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 ï¬rst 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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier, 2022. Vol. 143, article id 103748
Keywords [en]
Strip rolling, Process control, Reinforcement learning, Ensemble learning
National Category
Information Systems
Research subject
Dependable Communication and Computation Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-92412DOI: 10.1016/j.compind.2022.103748ISI: 000862575100002Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85135365518OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-92412DiVA, id: diva2:1686410
Note
Validerad;2022;Nivå 2;2022-08-09 (hanlid);
Funder: China Scholarship Council (202006080008); National Natural Science Foundation of China (52074085 and U21A20117); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (N2004010); LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (XLYC1907065)
2022-08-092022-08-092022-12-05Bibliographically approved