Experiences in the application of advanced control engineering in the process industry

Summary form only given. The skills and resources required adequately to model complex dynamics of industrial processes and to design and implement a consistent control strategy are many and varied. The process data may be manually logged or may arise as a supervisory computer datafile. The analysis may be performed manually or by a proprietary modelling package and the resultant control algorithm implemented via application programming at the supervisory process computer level. At each step there is scope for a lack of a consistent interpretation of the problem and it is possible that the performance of the control strategy will consequently be suboptimal. To address this problem Predictive Control Ltd. have developed the Connoisseur software package, which integrates the activities of data acquisition, process analysis, modelling and control system design and implementation. This paper discusses the application of the advanced control concepts embodied in the package to the control of a practical process industry problem. The problem is of considerable difficulty and defeated conventional approaches