“plant-friendly” System Identification: a Challenge for the Process Industries

The term “plant-friendly” system identification has been used within the chemical process control research community in reference to the broad-based goal of accomplishing informative identification testing while meeting the demands of industrial practice. While many different identification topics (such as control-relevant identification, closed-loop identification and optimal input design) can be said to contribute to plant-friendliness in identification, the problem has some unique character of its own. This paper describes some of the issues that motivate plant-friendly identification and presents an overview of some approaches that have been proposed in this topic. The problem of identification test monitoring is presented as a novel means for accomplishing plant-friendly identification.