Comparative Evaluation of Control Loop Performance Assessment Schemes in an Industrial Chemical Process Plant

Control loop performance assessment is a new-emerging operator support technology that is used to keep automated control loops performing as optimally as possible. This paper addresses this critically important issue through a comprehensive evaluation of common assessment criteria to efficiently explore their capabilities to assess for different control loop scenarios. For this purpose, an integrated computational framework will be developed, including a HYSYS environment to simulate an industrial separator process plant so as to preserve its operational realities. A control loop assessment software package is incoporporated utilizing MATLAB to mimic as an independent supervisory computational platform. To provide an interface link between these two different software environments, an OLE (Object Linking Embedding) protocol has been employed. Extensive simulation test studies have been prepared to explore the performance loop assessment of each individual control loop in the simulated process plant against conservative loop tuning, valve stiction, random disturbance, and loop interaction as the most probable malfunctions in the study. The effectiveness of individual assessment metric to infer for each malfunction ocurrance has been illustrated. It will be shown that each criterion has its own merits and limitations, implying for a collective application of all the considered methods to efficiently detect all the probable malfunctions, reflecting differently in the considered assessment measures for the CLPA task