Temperature Prediction of Heating Furnace Based on Deep Transfer Learning

Heating temperature is very important in the process of billet production, and it directly affects the quality of billet. However, there is no direct method to measure billet temperature, so we need to accurately predict the temperature of each heating zone in the furnace in order to approximate the billet temperature. Due to the complexity of the heating process, it is difficult to accurately predict the temperature of each heating zone and each heating zone sensor datum to establish a model, which will increase the cost of calculation. To solve these two problems, a two-layer transfer learning framework based on a temporal convolution network (TL-TCN) is proposed for the first time, which transfers the knowledge learned from the source heating zone to the target heating zone. In the first layer, the TCN model is built for the source domain data, and the self-transfer learning method is used to optimize the TCN model to obtain the basic model, which improves the prediction accuracy of the source domain. In the second layer, we propose two frameworks: one is to generate the target model directly by using fine-tuning, and the other is to generate the target model by using generative adversarial networks (GAN) for domain adaption. Case studies demonstrated that the proposed TL-TCN framework achieves state-of-the-art prediction results on each dataset, and the prediction errors are significantly reduced. Consistent results applied to each dataset indicate that this framework is the most advanced method to solve the above problem under the condition of limited samples.