Control and supervision of a complex production process using hybrid systems techniques

New processing activities for the decommissioning of the Experimental Breeder Reactor II are being carried out at Argonne National Laboratory. The task addressed in this paper is a process to convert metallic sodium to sodium carbonate. The main idea is to characterize this sodium operation as a system that integrates real-time continuous and discrete-ment components and then apply hybrid system techniques to design and implement the control and supervisory policies. This paper introduces the research in progress at ANL on this conversion process, the flow of material, and the hybrid control solution.