(144b) Building a Solid Foundation for a Successful Advanced Process Control (APC) Application

Advanced Process Control (APC) technologies such as Multi-Variable Control (MVC) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been around for a long time, but people often overlook the underlying (and less glamorous) layers. Based on 25+ years of APC implementation experience, a solid foundation is the key to a successful APC application.

Early practitioners (way back in the 1980s and 1990s) came from process and control engineering backgrounds and added MVC/MPC expertise on top of their solid foundation of knowledge. This experience was an important factor in the success and proliferation of MVC/MPC applications, but our ranks are thinning. New control engineers are often expected to maintain (and even implement) MVC/MPC applications before they have a chance to develop a solid foundation of process and control experience. Technology vendors are addressing this through practical software improvements, making their products more accessible to engineers who do not have years of process and control experience before taking on MVC/MPC.

This presentation will focus on the importance of the underlying layers and how to build a solid foundation for a successful MVC/MPC application. The presentation will include technology-independent tips and recommendations based on 25+ years of APC implementation experience in areas such as: identifying and dealing with instrumentation issues, base control structure and tuning, analyzers and inferentials, MV/CV selection, designing for reliability, application maintenance and support, and more. Feedback from user experiences is welcome and encouraged!