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For more than two centuries steel industry has played a big role in the world of economy.
Steel is present all around us: from buildings and vehicles, to every day utensils.
Steel production is a complex process requiring large facilities. Among the different steel products,
coils are flat steel products, primarily used for the automotive industry.
Coils are produced on demand to meet a well defined set of requirements for each customer.
ArcelorMittal, the leading company in the steel sector,
focuses on quality assurement to satisfy customers' expectations.
Before coils are shipped to customers, they are galvanized,
which means they are covered with a coat of Zinc. Immediately, after galvanization,
a decision is made regarding the assignment or the destination of the coil.
A software system reviews the product and process data to identify possible defects along the coil.
These inputs come from multiple sensors located in the production line and also from laboratory analysis.
The system classifies defects according to their type, their scope and their impact on the quality.
Eventually, the system makes a decision about each coil.
It can be scrapped, it can be repaired, the initial assignment is kept or it is reassigned to a different customer.
This is an example of a software system that implements the business policies of the company, using expert knowledge.
Ontorule project addresses this kind of systems based on business knowledge, and brings improvements in three areas:
1. Business policies acquisition 2. Business policies management 3. Business policies execution
Policy acquisition is a pre-requisite for building Business knowledge-based systems.
It involves taking the knowledge from its sources, usually the business experts.
They are the ones who master the concepts and the rules underneath the operation of the business.
Traditionally, this information has to be extracted by knowledge engineers by means of long interactions with the business experts.
Later the knowledge is translated into formal models in order to turn it into concrete software systems.
This is a time-consuming process, especially because initial models are refined and validated by interactive meetings with the business experts
Ontorule approach to improve knowledge acquisition is twofold. Firstly, business policies are usually captured by means of documents such as contracts, technical manuals, brochures or even regulations.
Ontorule is developing a toolset to analyze the content of these documents and to identify relevant pieces of business knowledge.
Secondly, the Ontorule methodology guides the process to obtain high quality formal models of business.
These models are communicated to the business experts in a friendly language in order to have them validated.
ArcelorMittal is the world leader of production of steel
For us the Knowledge of our people is a key value
We are conducting some activities to capitalize this knowledge
And this is sometimes done using software systems
for instance, we have some software tools to improve the quality of our products
However, the use of these systems is complex specially for the maintenance for the none IT specialist
We need solutions that can be managed in an easy way by the business experts
In addition we need that these solutions are generic enough to be transferable in an easy way to any of the plants we have in the world
Ontorule empowers business users to directly manage the applications based on expert knowledge by embracing the distinction between
the long-term static part of the models and the dynamic part of the knowledge.
Having them separated makes it easier to reuse them as needed.
Ontorule provides an integrated ownership of this knowledge.
The tools allow to understand and to author the business models and policies.
Applications are executed to control or take decisions at certain points of the industrial process.
There are mainly two paradigms to transform models into executable applications: namely production rules and logic programming rules.
Ontorule supports both prototypes and allows choosing the most appropriate one for each scenario.
The Ontorule demonstrator in the steel industry automates the quality assurance at the end of the galvanization line.
It uses the relevant concepts of the domain, such as coil and defect.
A set of rules react to the information coming from the sensors in the production line.
As an expert would do, the system decides whether the coil is:
1. sent to scrap 2. sent to repair 3. assigned to a customer
Ontorule provides companies with the tools they need for Business Knowledge acquisition, Management and Execution.
Acquisition is improved by means of a new methodology that takes into account documents capturing business policies.
Integrated ownership of the business knowledge is given back to the business users and finally innovative combinations of existing knowledge execution techniques
make it possible to transform the knowledge into business value.