SASS applied to optimum work roll profile selection in the hot rolling of wide steel

The quality of steel strip produced in a wide strip rolling mill depends heavily on the careful selection of initial ground work roll profiles for each of the mill stands in the finishing train. In the past, these profiles were determined by human experts, based on their knowledge and experience. In this research, SASS, a novel heuristic optimisation algorithm that has only one control parameter, has been used to find the optimum profiles for a simulated rolling mill. The best set of profiles found by SASS clearly outperformed the original set and performed equally well as conventional algorithms without the need of finding a suitable set of control parameters.