Design and implementation of a navigation control system for slag pot carriers based on combination of active RFID and WiFi technologies

Abstract

The supervision and management of staff and equipment will always result in performance enhancement. In Mobarakeh Steel Company which is located in Iran, the produced slag at electric arc furnaces was transported using slag pot carriers. In the absence of a control system to supervise the performance of these vehicles, managing replacement of slag pots was a challenging and difficult task. Although maintenance of slag pot carriers was expensive and needed specific expertise, there was no online supervisory system to avoid probable failures in vehicles. In order to improve the performance of the supervisory system of the slag pot carriers, a WiFi network was developed in the trajectory of slag pot carriers. Furthermore, the installed RFID-tags alongside the path of the travelling carriers have been read via the RFID-readers installed on the slag pot carriers. Then, the position and speed of the slag pot carriers were calculated and transmitted to the developed software. The performance of the slag pot carriers was improved by implementing the proposed new technology. In addition, stop time rate caused by obstruction of the roads was reduced by 80%. Thereby, systematic, efficient, and optimized slag pot replacement and personnel rotation schedules were developed and the desired productivity was achieved..