A MIXED CONTINUOUS-BATCH PROCESS: IMPLEMENTATION OF HYBRID PREDICTIVE CONTROLLERS

This paper deals with a mixed continuous-batch process, a pilot plant of our Lab, where both continuous decisions and scheduling take place. The interest of this contribution comes not only from the fact that it is a challenging control problem, but because problems with a similar structure are present in many industrial process. The paper describes the process, the instrumentation (classical analogical/discrete devices, Field Bus devices) and the global architecture of the pilot plant control (Distributed Control System DCS, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition SCADA, OPC communication, etc.). From a control point of view, it presents a brief description of control problem formulation in the framework of non-linear model predictive control, and a generic methodology to design this kind of predictive controllers. Finally it is presented the results of some real experiments.