The 64 papers include two of the meeting's three plenary papers, on process supervision by means of qualitative models, and framework-based software architectures for process automation systems. Others cover mining and minerals, steelmaking, planning, tools, communication, hot rolling, blast furnaces, and cold rolling. Specific topics include a new automated system for optimizing the ore-grinding process, heap leaching simulation, modelling force and torque for the strip casting process, applying principal component analysis to predict blast furnace stability, modeling visual flotation froth data, and a robust control system for cold rolling mills. Only authors are indexed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
MMM'98 was a meeting of scientists and practitioners from all over the world who presented the state-of-the-art in automating the processes of the basic industries and discussed current development trends in this field. 50 full papers and 12 poster shows were presented out of 90 draft papers; 18 of these 62 contributions were dedicated to problems of mining and minerals processing, 34 to metals processing and 10 to general problems of distributed automation systems.
These presentations were accompanied by 3 plenary papers which gave surveys on current developments of common interest for the MMM control community and by a panel discussion on the significance of what is called today Computational Intelligence (knowledge based systems, fuzzy logic and control, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and programming) in comparison with conventional control methods.
The main topics of the contributions were on one hand the application and applicability of modern automation methods and software-tools. On the other hand many papers gave practical experiences with implementations of automation systems in the basic industries.
