Hybrid neural prediction and optimized adjustment for coke oven gas system in steel industry

An energy system is the one of most important parts of the steel industry, and its reasonable operation exhibits a critical impact on manufacturing cost, energy security, and natural environment. With respect to the operation optimization problem for coke oven gas, a two-phase data-driven based forecasting and optimized adjusting method is proposed, where a Gaussian process-based echo states network is established to predict the gas real-time flow and the gasholder level in the prediction phase. Then, using the predicted gas flow and gasholder level, we develop a certain heuristic to quantify the user's optimal gas adjustment. The proposed operation measure has been verified to be effective by experimenting with the real-world on-line energy data sets coming from Shanghai Baosteel Corporation, Ltd., China. At present, the scheduling software developed with the proposed model and ensuing algorithms have been applied to the production practice of Baosteel. The application effects indicate that the software system can largely improve the real-time prediction accuracy of the gas units and provide with the optimized gas balance direction for the energy optimization.