Community-based synthesis of distributed control architectures for integrated process networks

•Community structure is used to design distributed control architecture.•New interactivity measure is used to classify inputs, states and outputs.•Graph theory-based synthesis method is fast, efficient, flexible and scalable.•Application to several industrially relevant example systems is discussed.

In this paper, we propose a graph-theoretic framework for designing architectures for distributed control. Specifically, the popular concept of community structure is used to decompose an integrated network into multiple sub-networks with minimum interactions. The state space of the network is represented as an equation graph (directed). Communities identified on this graph represent sub-controllers for the distributed control system. A quality measure 'interactivity' is defined to compare such decompositions. The proposed method has many advantages (e.g. possibility of non-square controllers, provision to ensure controllability and observability, scalability, etc.) over existing approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is illustrated via several industrially relevant examples.

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