Temporal Association Rule Mining and Updating and Their Application to Blast Furnace in the Steel Industry

Blast furnace (BF) is the main method of modern iron-making. Ensuring the stability of the BF conditions can effectively improve the quality and output of iron and steel. However, operations of BF depend on mainly human experience, which causes two problems: (1) human experience is not objective and is difficult to inherit and learn and (2) it is difficult to acquire knowledge that contains time information among multiple variables in BF. To address these problems, a data-driven method is proposed. In this article, we propose a novel and efficient algorithm for discovering underlying knowledge in the form of temporal association rules (TARs) in BF iron-making data. First, a new TAR mining framework is proposed for mining temporal frequent patterns. Then, a novel TAR mining algorithm is proposed for mining underlying, up-to-date, and effective knowledge in the form of TARs. Finally, considering the updating of the BF database, a rule updating method is proposed that is based on the algorithm that is proposed in this article. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed algorithm in discovering TARs in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Experiments on BF iron-making data have demonstrated the superior performance and practicability of the proposed method.