Decision support for control structure selection during plant design

During the design of chemical processes, considerable effort is put into developing and refining stationary process models. Once a process model has been developed, significant value can be added by its subsequent reuse for plant design, design of operational strategies, control concepts and even for operational support of an existing plant. In this work, we present a methodology for the simple and efficient re-use of the steady-state simulation data in the context of the process control structure selection which follows basic ideas of the self-optimizing control paradigm of Morari et al. (1980). It is shown how the approach is integrated into a decision support tool, which has already been successfully applied to one of our large-scale investment projects.