Practical design and implementation of a control loop performance assessment package in an industrial plant

Practical design and implementation of a customized control loop performance assessment (CLPA) software package has been addressed in this paper. The assessment algorithms are developed in MATLAB software environment to provide an easy way to devise the required calculation blocks. The developed algorithms are embedded in an integrated CLPA package to execute the target diagnostic performance analysis. The designed CLPA package is then implemented in an industrial simulated propylene glycol plant to assess performances of two flow and one temperature controllers using Aspen HYSYS simulator in MATLAB runtime. For this purpose, an interactive interface has been developed and realized in the designed CLPA package to allow communication between MATLAB runtime and Aspen-HYSYS using Microsoft OLE (Object Linking Embedding) local automation server. Different test scenarios have been organized to carry out the simulation environment to validate the capabilities of the designed CLPA package in detecting loop oscillation, valve stiction and loop interaction. The simulation results clearly demonstrate promising outcomes.