Business and bandwidth: A tutorial on how business and use models affect industrial control design

Students investigating control problems often learn a lot of wondrous algorithms that impart near mythical properties to the systems that they are applied to. At least this is how it works in theory and simulation. In practice, however, a thorough understanding of the system, the use model, and the market is often far more important than the differences between any two optimization algorithms. Knowing when and where a particular algorithm is useful is typically at the heart of real control problems. The session, through a series of four talks by presenters with deep industrial experience, will describe a set of industrial control problems. These problems will provide context for control designs. The participant will come to understand industrial control not as a problem of “how to best optimize algorithm X” but of which of many algorithms can help in a practical way.