Design of Control Structure for Integrated Process Networks Based on Graph-theoretic Analysis

Abstract

A novel graph representation is developed to address the control structure selection of the process networks featuring multiple scale material and energy dynamics, which is a combination of the process flow graph and energy flow graph so that both the material and energy flow structures of the process networks in each time scale can be captured and analysed at the same time using a graph theory based procedure. The control structure of the network evolved in each time scale is then optimally designed by employing a graph-theoretic approach, which can be used as the basis for hierarchical control structure of the whole process networks. The effectiveness of the proposed graph-theoretic procedure for control structure selection is finally verified via an example of a vinyl acetate process.