Plantwide control of industrial processes: An integrated framework of simulation and heuristics

The novel plantwide control (PWC) methodologies are becoming increasingly important as chemical processes are becoming more and more integrated with recycles for reasons of safety, environmental considerations, and economics. Hence, in the present work, an integrated framework of simulation and heuristics is proposed. The main emphasis here is on vertical integration of simulation and heuristics which exploits the inherent interlink between them. By adopting this framework, simulators can be more efficiently utilized and they also offer invaluable support to the decisions taken by heuristics. The proposed framework is then successfully applied to an industrially relevant case study: the hydrodealkylation of toluene (HDA) process. An analysis of results shows that the proposed framework builds synergies between the powers of both the simulation and the heuristics, thereby resulting in a practical PWC methodology that leads to a viable control system.