Supervision model for the annealing process in a stainless steel production line

Annealing is an important process in the production of stainless steel coils. In this paper we present a system for supervising this process in a production line. To implement it, we need to acquire continuously the temperatures along the annealing furnace and the speed of the line and to correlate them with each production units or coils. In order to manage all that information, a simple model of the furnace has been built and simple annealing functions have also been proposed whose integration along a space-time trajectory provides a powerful supervision tool for the quality control engineer.