Issue |
Matériaux & Techniques
Volume 108, Number 5-6, 2020
Materials and Society: transitions in society, materials and energy
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 508 | |
Number of page(s) | 10 | |
Section | Mise en oeuvre des matériaux / Materials processing | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/mattech/2021010 | |
Published online | 26 April 2021 |
Regular Article
Current and future aspects of the digital transformation in the European Steel Industry
1
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, TeCIP Institute, ICT-COISP Center,
Pisa, Italy
2
RINA CONSULTING – Centro Sviluppo Materiali S.p.A. (CSM),
Castel Romano (Roma), Italy
3
Technische Universität Dortmund,
Dortmund, Germany
* e-mail: colla@sssup.it
Received:
4
October
2020
Accepted:
8
March
2021
The technological transformation in the European steel industry is driven by digitalization, which has the potential to strongly contribute to improving production efficiency and sustainability. The present paper describes part of the work developed in the early stage of the project entitled “Blueprint ‘New Skills Agenda Steel’: Industry-driven sustainable European Steel Skills Agenda and Strategy (ESSA)”, which is funded by the Erasmus Plus Programme of the European Union. The project aims at achieving an industry driven, sustainable and coordinated blueprint for addressing the economic, digital and technological developments, as well as increasing energy efficiency and environmental demands through continuously update of qualification, knowledge and skill profiles of the workforce. On the one hand, main aspects of the current state of the technological transformation in the steel sector are described through the analysis of the main recent innovation projects and developments. On the other hand, survey results from a dedicated questionnaire addressed to the European steel companies are analyzed, providing an overview on the (planned) technological transformation affecting the steel sector. The existing levels of plant automation and the possible adoption of the new paradigm of Industry 4.0 are discussed, by also considering the possible impact on the workforce. Main results are that the steel industry foresees an implementation of almost all Industry 4.0 technologies not only for competitive but also environmental improvement. Because this is foreseen in an incremental way upskilling of the existing workforce is a precondition, not only because of recruitment difficulties on the employment market but also because the existing qualification and experience of the workplace is necessary to unfold the full potential of digital and green transformation.
© SCF, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.