A discussion of the actual status of process control in theory and practice: a personal view from German process industry

Abstract

The contribution aims at stimulating a dialogue between academia and industry: from an application point of view, the authors observe in the field of process control an ongoing drift between theory and practice. As engineers, the authors are concerned that this drift weakens the position of process control as a whole. Hence, a thorough analysis and a following discussion are at need. In order to contribute to the aforementioned dialogue, first the state of the art of process control in the Western European chemical industry is reported by displaying the results of a Western-European-wide survey. Thereafter, a discussion of the actual context of industrial applications of process control is led. Finally, the contribution is concluded in view of opening the field for the dialogue in need by some remarks fostering the future of process control as a whole.

An improved development process of production plants using digital twins with extended dynamic behaviour in virtual commissioning and control – Simulation@Operations

“…Model‐based control methods are uncommon in the SME‐based automation industry. They are only found in the chemical and petrochemical industry under the name advanced process control (APC), where their implementation on a programmable logic controller (PLC) is manual and costly, and the production capacity so large that a fast return of invest can be expected [7, 8]. However, in academics, model‐based control has emerged as a state‐of‐the‐art approach and offers potential to implement lighter, more dynamic structures by considering structural flexibility in control [9].…”

Challenges in Optimization and Control of Biobased Process Systems: An Industrial-Academic Perspective

“…Operation/automation are generally considered easier for continuous processes. 30,32 Trends in continuous time-series are more easily observable.…”

“…In this context, the pharmaceutical production case study in ref 31 vividly shows the contrast to large-scale continuous chemical processes where the level of automation is usually high. 32 These disparities motivate a brief review of relevant aspects of plantwide control in section 3.3.…”

“…Here, process control and reactive scheduling are strongly linked, which makes it difficult to speak of plantwide control. Generally, based on an industrial survey, Piechottka et al 32 note that the degree of automation of batch plants tends to be lower than in continuous Due to the widespread separation of upstream and downstream processes in industry and academia, supervisory control and operation will be regarded individually in the next two sections.…”