International Seminar: Digitalization as Key Driver in the Steel Industry: Cases from some RFCS funded projects.

The steel industry is experiencing a rapid worldwide evolution in terms of management structures, technology and business. In this context, technological innovation and digitalization play a significant role. This seminar aims to explore the challenges digitalization is imposing to the steel industry from the perspective of the experience gained both, from an ongoing project touching very different sections of the value chain (scrap collection, steel transformation and applications to the automotive industry) but also through the observation of the long run of research projects being developed in the last twenty years. Both visions were found somehow complementary, i.e. experience from the field and semantic analysis of findings, and they allow us to predict new strategic challenges to be undertaken. The selected format was to keep the consistency in perspective, but allowing each partner to describe the impact of the research carried out and how they see the next steps from their perspective. At the end, some reflective analysis of trends will be summarized. To complete the perspective a session for questions to all the participants will be carried out, where it will be possible to collect different opinions as well. This is an initiative supported by the aliance between EELISA (the STRIDE community around EELISA initiative), PLATEA, and the consortiums of the two EU-RFCS projects (WISEST, and ControlInSteel) to disseminate the benefits of digitalization processes in smart industries.