Dynamic Soft Sensor Model for Endpoint Carbon Content and Temperature in BOF Steelmaking Based on Adaptive Feature Matching Variational Autoencoder

The key to endpoint control in basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steelmaking lies in accurately predicting the endpoint carbon content and temperature. However, BOF steelmaking data are complex and change distribution due to variations in raw material batches, process adjustments, and equipment conditions, leading to concept drift and affecting model performance. In order to resolve these problems, this paper proposes a dynamic soft sensor model based on an adaptive feature matching variational autoencoder (VAE-AFM). Firstly, this paper innovatively proposes an adaptive feature matching (AFM) method. This method utilizes the maximum mean discrepancy to calculate the values of the marginal and conditional distributions. Based on the discrepancy between these two values, a dynamic adjustment algorithm is designed to adaptively assign different weights to the two distributions. This approach dynamically and quantitatively evaluates and adjusts the relative importance of different distributions in the domain adaptation process, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of cross-domain data alignment. Secondly, a variational autoencoder (VAE) is employed to process the data, as the VAE model can capture the complex data structures and latent features in the steelmaking process. Finally, the features extracted by the VAE are processed with the adaptive feature matching method, thereby constructing the VAE-AFM dynamic soft sensor model. Experimental studies on actual BOF steelmaking data validate the efficacy of the offered approach, offering a reliable solution to the challenges of high complexity and concept drift in BOF steelmaking data.