On the way to autonomous model predictive control: a distillation column simulation study

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful tool in the control of large scale chemical processes and has become the standard method for constrained multivariable control problems. Hence, the number of MPC applications is increasing steadily and it is being used in application domains other than petrochemical industries. A common observation by the industrial practitioners is that success of any MPC application requires not only efficient initial deployment but also maintenance of initial effectiveness. To this end, we propose a novel high level automated support strategy for MPC systems. Such a strategy consists of components such as performance monitoring, performance diagnosis, least costly closed loop experiment design, re-identification and autotuning. This work presents the novel technological developments in each component and demonstrates them on a distillation column case study. We show that automated support strategy restores nominal performance after a performance drop is detected and takes the right course of action depending on its cause.