The ambition of the Morse project was to develop a holistic, overarching system for process industries, providing methodologies and means for offline analysis of plant-wide material and energy flows as well as real-time through-process coordination, optimisation and control of production processes in an integrated way. This was achieved by modifying and qualifying individual process models for use in overarching control and optimisation and by developing optimisation methods and algorithms for unit process control as well as plant wide coordination and management.
The overall evaluation of results compared to set objectives targets showed that improvements related to energy consumption, raw material usage, CO2 emissions, and different process and quality figures were overall achieved. During the testing period, the developed Morse tools led to significant savings in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions, although the evaluation in some cases were rather difficult due to changes in processes. Considering the large number of use cases, the results show that the developed tools have good potential for improving the process efficiency. After further and wider adoption of the tools, the impacts for lowering the consumption of energy and raw materials, and reducing yield losses will further increase and become possible in wider scale and other industries.
Main Morse output results, in terms of steelmaking products, are strongly connected with increasing efficiency in the use of raw materials and energy, the reduction of CO2 emissions and increasing quality of the products. The specific KPIs established within the Morse project objectives are aligned with the EU strategy to increase competitiveness of EU industry and more specifically the steel industry. At the same time, Morse project developments in plant-wide optimisation tools, the use of nonlinear model predictive control applications and Operator Support Systems integrated with “Digital Twins” are already consistent with the EU strategies related to digitisation of EU Industry and the use of artificial Intelligence. It is clear that the potential of the Morse results both in terms of efficient steel production and the developed technologies related with the digitisation of the industry is huge and it can be extended not only to other areas, processes or units in steel making but also to a lot of other manufacturing and process industries in EU.
