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A mobile crane is widely used not only to daily work but also to carry heavy materials efficiently in a construction site after the time of disaster. However, the decreases in the number of expert persons induce crane accident. As it is well known, the crane operation is highly complicated even for experts. It is required to realize a partial automation of crane operation and human support technology in the near future. In this paper, a human interface system is proposed intended to human support of a mobile crane operation. We developed the crane simulator which is composed of the hydraulic circuit model and the model for a crane dynamics. Based on the simulator, the human interface system for the operation support based on recurrent neural network (RNN) is proposed.

Steel making process is the key process where the product quality of the finished steel is mainly determined. The process consists of LD converter, secondary refining and continuous caster. From the refining of steel by LD converter to the solidification by continuous caster, a large amount of molten steel with high temperature is processed. In the process, a lot of steel lots are reduced and transported in steel pots to cope with the product demands. It is very important to control temperature of the molten steel at a certain level during transportation to assure the safety operation in continuous caster. The problem is to determine production schedule of the steel making considering temperature drop of all pots during treatment and transportation. The scheduling method using agent model based on the ant algorithm is applied to the transportation and the production scheduling for steel making process in steel works. Scheduling combining the ant algorithm and the temperature calculation model to check temperature constraints in the process is made. The practicability of the developed scheduling method is checked numerically comparing results of actual operations in steel works.

Recently, it becomes important to improve transportation capability to attain high productivity of manufacturing. One of the necessary scheme to attain the purpose is that the floor layout is initially to be optimized. After the floor layout is determined, reasonable route position for transportation is decided. Then the transportation route scheduling is determined. In this paper, design support system for transportation routing, based on agent method is proposed. To optimize the transportation route positions, the working space by the side of the equipment is to be considered. In this paper, starting from given floor layout of a factory, an appropriate transportation route is generated using Ant algorithm. To check the applicability of the proposed method, case studies are carried out changing constraints and objective functions, and its effects were analized.