The application of a valve positioning controller (VPC) on top of a basic regulatory plantwide control structure for maximizing the process through-put to increase plant profitability is demonstrated. The input to the VPC is a measurement of the bottleneck constraint and its output is the set-point of the through-put manipulator. The HDA process is used as an example case study with the feed hy...

The Gas to Gasoline (GTG) process includes conversion of natural, flare, and associated gas into synthetic fuels that can be compositionally upgraded and adjusted into different useful hydrocarbon fuels including gasoline, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), and fuel gas. Commonly, the GTG process involves three stages: 1) Synthesis gas (syngas) production unit 2) Methanol production unit 3) Methanol t...

Most standard MPC implementations partition the plant into several units and apply MPC individually to these units. It is known that this strategy can lead to sub-optimal plant-wide control performance, especially if the units interact strongly. This paper tackles the problem of achieving optimal control performance in plants with such an MPC structure. A modeling framework, geared for use in M...

In this work, we apply the systematic approach to plant-wide control design presented in [1], based on the fundamentals of process networks, thermodynamics and systems theory, to the Tennessee Eastman (TE) Challenge Process, deriving robust decentralized controllers that will ensure the stability of the complete plant. We take one step further in the control design procedure by completing it wi...