The plant design and control tasks are usually carried out sequentially. Initially the plant is designed and then the control structure is determined as a function of the design. Such a formulation neglects the coupling between design and control. This may lead to processes where a suitable control scheme cannot be synthesized for a given design. Even if a control scheme can be generated, it ha...

A signiicant obstacle to achieving heterogeneous system interconnection is the need to maintain compatible network protocols on all communicating systems. Protocol standardization and prooling has long been viewed as a way to overcome this obstacle. The exclusive nature of this approach, however, presents certain limitations. Among them are exclusion of sometimes superior technology and the nec...