Chemical Engineering Science, Vol.160, 121-130, 2017
Dynamic allocation of industrial utilities as an optimal stochastic tracking problem
A new dynamic optimization strategy is substantiated for allocating demands, in a typical process plant, to a set of service equipment working in parallel. It is a stochastic process in nature, but its optimal control is based on the solution to a related deterministic optimal tracking problem to minimize a quadratic cost objective restricted by linear dynamics. The main theoretical novelty, demonstrated here, is the separation theorem for the stochastic tracking problem. This means: the desired optimal stochastic solution can be calculated from the solution to the deterministic problem, by replacing the state variable with their optimal estimates, which can be generated online following a Kalman filter scheme. The set-points assigned to each conventional controlled device are allowed to be continuously changed while: (i) minimizing a combined cost, which is cumulative in time and takes into account the dynamics of all the individual utilities, and (ii) generating a feedback law that can cope with general disturbances, like changes in fuel composition and with noisy measurements, i.e. with differences between the predicted and the measured values of the variables.
Keywords:Utility allocation problems;Optimal control;Tracking separation principle;Supervisory control