Industrial Implementation of a Coordinator MPC for Maximizing Throughput at a Large-Scale Gas Plant

AbstractAn industrial implementation of a coordinator MPC to maximize throughput at the large-scale Kårstø gas plant is described. The “coordinator MPC” coordinates the flows through the network and not the local MPCs. It uses as degrees of freedom (MVs) the flows not used by the local MPCs (feeds, crossovers), and maximizes the throughput subject to the keeping the remaining capacities in all units zero or positive. A key idea is to use the local MPCs to estimate the remaining capacities in the units (Aske et al., 2008). Although not fully implemented, the coordinator MPC is found to be a promising tool for implementing maximum throughput.