Computer Aided Tools for Designing Plant-wide Control Structures for Large-scale Industrial Processes

Abstract

In this work a systematic design procedure of a plant-wide control structure is applied to a well known benchmark problem of a large-scale pulp mill process [2]. Because of the high dimension of this system it was necessary to develop some additional computer aided tools for support calculations. It is based on the minimization of the sum of squared deviations (SSD index) [19] which is done via the use of genetic algorithm. It represents a good trade-off between achieve acceptable results with less computational effort. Previous works presented alternative solutions but using several heuristic considerations for reducing the problem dimensionality. The obtained performance with the selected control structure and the decentralized strategy presented previously [3] are compared. Several closed-loop simulations for critical set point changes are rigorously evaluated here.