Digital Transformation in Steel Inspection
The steel manufacturer requested improvements to the existing equipment to overcome their process issues . The key objectives were to a ) reduce inspector workloads , and b ) provide automatic auditing capabilities . These objectives would address the issues with higher demand for inspections and longer working hours , as well as the serious problem of false record keeping .
UPDATED STEEL INSPECTION SYSTEM
Figure 4-1 Updated steel inspection analysis
The new system ( Figure 4-1 ) was designed with an IIoT architecture , using a combination of Edge , Platform , and Enterprise services in a 3-Tier Architecture Pattern , and implemented using containerized micro-services 10 11 .
The system process flow was developed as follows :
1 . Transfer steel sample ’ s image data from microscope to image historian database
• By using the same equipment as before , the original process remains very similar for the inspector .
2 . Transfer image data with sequence number to cloud for feeding an AI model estimator
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IIC Journal of Innovation 77