PROCESS CONTROL Economic Incentives for Automation Projects

Economic Incentives for Automation Projects Industrial applications of advanced process control strategies such as MPC are motivated by the need for improvements regarding safety, product quality, environmental standards, and economic operation of the process. One view of the economics incentives for advanced automation techniques is illustrated in Fig. 8-41. Distributed control systems (DCS) are widely used for data acquisition and conventional singleloop (PID) control. The addition of advanced regulatory control systems such as selective controls, gain scheduling, and time-delay compensation can provide benefits for a modest incremental cost. But 

8-41 Economic incentives for automation projects in the process industries. 

A key reason why MPC has become a major commercial and technical success is that there are numerous vendors who are licensed to market MPC products and install them on a turnkey basis. Consequently, even medium-sized companies are able to take advantage of this new technology. Payout times of 3 to 12 months have been widely reported. 

Basic Features of MPC Model predictive control strategies have a number of distinguishing features  

A dynamic model of the process is used to predict the future outputs over a prediction horizon consisting of the next P sampling periods. 

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