We investigate an industrial case study of a system distributed over a network, namely, a large-scale hydraulic network which underlies a district heating system. The network comprises an arbitrarily large number of components (valves, pipes, and pumps). After introducing the model for this class of networks, we show how to achieve semiglobal practical pressure regulation at designated points of the network by proportional control laws which use local information only. In the analysis, the presence of positivity constraints on the actuators (centrifugal pumps) is explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, motivated by the need of transmitting the values taken by the control laws to the pumps of the network in order to distribute the control effort, we study the pressure regulation problem using quantized controllers. The findings are supported by experimental results

We investigate an industrial case study of a system distributed over a network, namely, a large-scale hydraulic network which underlies a district heating system. The network comprises an arbitrarily large number of components (valves, pipes, and pumps). After introducing the model for this class of networks, we show how to achieve semiglobal practical pressure regulation at designated points of the network by proportional control laws which use local information only. In the analysis, the presence of positivity constraints on the actuators (centrifugal pumps) is explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, motivated by the need of transmitting the values taken by the control laws to the pumps of the network in order to distribute the control effort, we study the pressure regulation problem using quantized controllers. The findings are supported by experimental results.

The general ideas within plug and play process control (P 3 C ) are to initialize and reconfigure control systems just by plug and play. In this paper these ideas are applied to a district heating pressure control problem. First of all this serves as a concrete example of P 3 C , secondly some of the first techniques developed in the project to solve the problems in P 3 C are presented. These are in the area of incremental modelling and control and they make it possible to "plug" in a new sensor and actuator and make it "play" automatically.

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