Preparation of Papers for IFAC Conferences & Symposia: Integration of Process Design and Control Using Hierarchical Control Structure

The integration of process design and control (IPDC) has become increasingly important and received considerable academic and practitioner attention over the recent decades. Moreover, some works in the field have utilized advanced controllers into IPDC framework. Considering the fact that the hierarchical control structure which consists of local PID controllers and an advanced process control (APC) as the central controller has been used widely in industrial practice, in this paper, the two-level hierarchical control structure is taken into account within the IPDC framework for the first time. The IPDC problem using hierarchical control structure is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem, which separates the design decisions from the APC decisions and then keeps the problem size manageable. And the APC decisions are incorporated in a superstructure-based dynamic optimization formulation which considers both cost and controllability. A continuous stirred tank reactor is used to test the proposed IPDC methodology.