Exploitable results A REUSABLE FRAMEWORK FOR HOT ROLLING MILLS; REFORM Currently, process automation is rewritten from scratch for every new rolling mill in spite of the fact that up to 70% of such systems could be reused. Using REFORM (Reusable Framework for Hot Rolling Mills), new process automation systems can be developed by customizing this framework to the special needs of a particular rolling mill. A framework is a semi-finished software product that captures about 70% of the tasks that are common to all software systems in the given domain (here hot rolling mills). The remaining 30% are custom-made and simply plugged into the framework for a particular mill automation. This will cut down the software development costs by 40-60% and will give European manufacturers a clear advantage over their competitors on both time-to-market and quality. The REFORM framework allows a process automation software vendor to produce this software faster and in a more reliable form. Since about 70% of the necessary software can be reused from the framework, time-to-market will be decreased and the software production costs will be lowered. Object-oriented technology is also an asset in itself. It leads to software which is better structured and easier to maintain. As a demonstrator, the REFORM framework is used to develop the process automation software of a roughing mill at Voest Alpine Stahl Linz AG. Interestingly, several similar frameworks could be developed for other industry domains such as paper mills. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
