POSCO Opens 'POINT' Showcasing 50 Years of Maintenance Technology Expertise

Smart Search System Providing Optimal Solutions for Steel Mill Site Control Device Recovery
Offers Cause, Action Methods, Problem Occurrence Probability, and Inspection Priority During Equipment Abnormalities
Expected to Reduce Technical Discrepan

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters, Reporter Heo Seon-sik] POSCO has launched the smart search system ‘POINT,’ which provides the optimal solution for restoring control devices at steelworks.

POINT is an acronym for Po sco, Artificial, In telligence, T rouble-Shooting, and is POSCO’s unique system that identifies the cause of equipment abnormalities and offers the most suitable measures or inspection methods.

Representative control devices at steelworks include Drive and PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), which store data generated by operating equipment and control the process. These devices have diverse and complex failure types, making it difficult to identify causes, and recovery has been challenging due to significant variation in responses depending on the operator’s skill level.

To resolve this, POSCO gathered equipment control experts and AI specialists to systematically organize various manuals, technical documents, and employees’ 50 years of maintenance skills and abnormal response know-how into a database, then integrated AI specialized in natural language processing to develop the smart search solution.

Accordingly, this system goes beyond simply listing response methods as in the past, providing predicted failure causes and occurrence probabilities, inspection priorities, and other information through correlation analysis with failure histories or similar cases at other plants, thereby suggesting optimal response and inspection methods. The system is designed to improve accuracy as users provide feedback on response results and satisfaction, so the fault diagnosis function continuously improves as usage increases.

The system is also developed as an app, allowing anyone to conveniently find desired information anywhere with a tablet or smartphone. Additionally, new employees or those transferred from other departments with limited field experience can learn about failure types through the POINT system regularly, enabling active utilization of accumulated knowledge and know-how.

POSCO expects that the introduction of the POINT system will reduce the variation in response skills among operators and shorten the time required for equipment restoration by about 30% on average.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.