PRESS RELEASE: Baoshan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd., ranking 2nd in the crude steel production, 1st in the automotive sheet output, and 1st in the silicon steel output among all the global listed steel companies, is in collaboration with China Telecom, Huawei, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications to explore the application of intelligent steel production.

Based on 5G technology, Baosteel is committed to building smart steel and leading the innovation of the industry, including remote control of overhead cranes, remote control of stacker-reclaimer, 5G slag adding robots, automatic driving of heavy-load AGV, 5G AI scrap steel grading, and steel surface quality inspection.

Under the traditional industrial architecture, Baosteel has faced many problems including:

  1. Carbon emission is high and the scrap steel recycling is insufficient.
  2. Material management relying on labor results in high cost and low efficiency.
  3. The quality inspection link completed by on-site labor results in lots of wrong and missed inspections and high safety risk.

The core production and management processes, such as industrial automation and product testing, require high network capability including wirelarization, mobility, latency, reliability, capacity, and density. Therefore, 5G deterministic network capabilities are the key to enter the core production and business processes of enterprises.

Baosteel constructs 5G private network from three aspects:

  1. Integrate mobile and wired networks. Baoshan Base extends the wired networks by utilizing 5G wireless access technology. By constructing 5GC network, the localized 5GC network equipment adopts the active/standby and load sharing setting to realize 99.999% reliability.
  2. Promote 5G construction with 5G applications.

By utilizing 5G technologies, the latency and reliability can be gradually achieved. After sinking data to UPF, each factory directly connects to the control network to access backbone network. 5G LAN network is constructed to realize the local data forwarding and reduce the risk of information blocking. By super time-frequency folding (Complementary TDD） and TRS-URLLC, the delay is reduced by more than 60%. By DFSR (dual fed and selective receiving), the receiver recovers the lost data from the replication stream. Through these technologies, the delay and reliability reach 4ms and 99.999%.

3. To B drives to C to gradually achieve comprehensive signal coverage.

The company’s mobile communication network construction promotes network construction for individuals with better signal coverage. Baoshan Base has built 43 5G communication base stations, and plans to build 20 more stations to fill signal blindness in 2024.

By deploying 5G deterministic network, the company recycled 250,000 tons of scrap steel, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1.732 million tons in 2022;

Reduce labor costs: 54 million yuan per year;

Improve safety: Unmanned crane and AI quality inspection keep steel workers away from dangerous environments.

Based on the 5G deterministic network, Baosteel sets foot on the realistic industrial scenarios by adopting intelligent platforms to realize high quality development of steel. Driven by the trend of the interconnection of everything, 5G deterministic network is conducive to the realization of autonomy, automation and intelligent generation in the future industrial field.