The steel industry is undergoing a gradual transition towards more sustainable production while continuing to meet the demand for high-quality steel products. Traditional steelmaking processes remain a significant source of CO2 emissions but new production technologies, increased use of renewable electricity, and hydrogen-based processes are creating opportunities to reduce environmental impacts. However, the transition presents considerable challenges, as steel producers must make long-term operational and investment decisions under uncertain future conditions, including changes in energy availability, energy prices, carbon costs, and market requirements.
Future steelworks are expected to include combinations of established and emerging production routes. As these technologies interact within the same industrial site, managing material flows, energy systems, process gases, and emissions becomes increasingly complex. There is thus a need for decision-making tools both for planning long-term investments and operation under fluctuating market conditions during the transition to lower-carbon production.
The AgiFlex project addresses this need by developing a digital modelling and optimisation platform for integrated steelworks. The project combines digital twins of current and future production processes with agent-based optimisation methods to analyse plant-wide interactions and support decision-making. This platform can thus help identifying operating strategies and development pathways that reduce CO2 emissions, improve energy efficiency, lower fossil fuel consumption, and make more effective use of available resources, including process gases and hydrogen.
A central aspect of the developed tools is the possibility to flexibly evaluate different plant configurations rather than relying on predefined production flows. This allows exploration of different technology combinations and operating conditions, also in intermediate transition stages where conventional blast furnace-based production and newer direct reduction routes may operate simultaneously.
Overall objectives of the project are thus to develop the multi-agent framework, create digital twins for current and future steelmaking processes, analyse alternative production and energy scenarios, identify optimized decarbonisation pathways, and validate the approach through industrial demonstrations. The project also seeks to support strategic decisions concerning process integration, renewable energy use, hydrogen deployment, carbon capture technologies, and circular material flows.
