Economic assessment of advanced process control – A survey and framework

A key objective of industrial advanced process control (APC) projects is to stabilize the process operation. In order to justify the cost associated with the introduction of new APC technologies to a process, the benefits have to be quantified in economic terms. In the past, economic assessment methods have been developed that link the variation of key controlled process variables to economic performance quantities. This paper reviews these methods and incorporates them in a framework for the economic evaluation of APC projects. A web-based survey on the economic assessment of process control has been completed by over 60 industrial APC experts. The results give information about the state-of-the-art assessment of economic benefits of advanced process control.