On the use of Petri nets for design, verification and optimization of control procedures for batch processes

The chemists and chemical engineers who are responsible for the automatic operation of batch plants in the chemical companies and are not familiar with theories of discrete-event dynamic systems are faced with the problem of batch process control and have created the concept of basic operations and recipes to determine the requirements for automatic control. The goal of the paper is to cross the gap between the theoretical, sophisticated techniques and formalisms and the concept which satisfies the practical needs of engineers dealing with problems of industrial size and complexity, and to show how recipes can be used as an input description for Petri net based analysis and optimization methods. It is shown how recipe-based control procedures and the models of the plant can be translated into predicate/transition nets, a special class of high-level Petri nets. A concept for performance evaluation and optimization is described