Intelligent Processes: Leveraging the Data Revolution for Decision and Control

We are currently at the dawn of what is considered the fourth industrial revolution. This revolution is driven by a combination of internet connected devices, large volumes of data, significant computing power and major algorithmic advances in artificial intelligence. It presents a unique opportunity for process industries to interpret data in new ways and derive information necessary to enable intelligent decisions at various levels of operation.

We will start with an introduction to major recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and describe how they can be used to solve problems in process modeling, fault detection and diagnosis and control. In particular, we will take the audience through a journey of process data analytics that includes traditional multivariate statistical approaches as well as more modern tools such as variational auto encoders and deep neural networks. This will be followed by a quick tour of reinforcement learning and its potential to change the decision and control paradigm as we know it today. The talk will be interspersed with several relevant industrial and simulated examples.