A novel exergy-event based model predictive control strategy for energy saving

Industrial processes are among the biggest energy consumers and also the highest energy-wasting fields and many applied methods have been proposed to save energy more in these processes. The main purpose of event-based control is to reduce the computing load and communication efforts only after an event occurs which could save energy. Energy consumption and control performance are major challenges in event-based control. Exergy is the basic criterion to analyze a process in terms of the energy associated with control performance. MPC a widely used in industry, is utilized to solve an optimal control problem based on control performance aiming to save more energy. Moreover, MPC enables the controller to cope explicitly with MIMO plants and constraints such as state constraints and actuator constraints. The exergy-event based strategy under the general model predictive control (MPC) framework from viewpoint of energy saving is investigated in this paper. It will be shown that the proposed architecture is guaranteed to reduce the energy and exergy losses, the computational burden and communication effort of the whole system.