The Use of Economic Performance Measures to Synthesize Optimal Control Systems

Abstract

Care must be taken in the synthesis of control systems which maximize the profitability of a plant because optimization equations do not always have a solution. When a typical process was constrained to instantaneously give the design product rate, a linear feedback controller was almost equivalent to the most profitable controller and was superior to most other multivariable systems. Perturbation techniques can be used to assess the significance of the process nonlinearities and to develop multivariable, nonlinear feedback controllers that are simple to Implement.