Application of Plantwide Control to Large Scale Systems. Part I - Self-optimizing Control of the Hda Process

This paper describes the application of self-optimizing control to a large scale process, the HDA plant. The idea is to select controlled variables which when kept constant lead to minimum economic loss. In order to avoid the combinatorial problem common to the selection of outputs/measurements for such large plants, applications of singular value decomposition (SVD) based methods are used which, although not guaranteeing optimality, give a consistent and practical way for selection. A controllability analysis is carried out to compare the dynamic performance of the selected sets of controlled variables and the conclusion is that the expected performances of the proposed control structures are essentially the same. Copyright c ©2006 IFAC