Dňa 25.1.2008 sa v m.č. 641 na OIRP ÚIAM FCHPT STU v Bratislave uskutoční odborný seminár na tému Real-Time Optimization of Dynamic Processes via NCO Tracking. Prednášajúci je Dr. Benoit Chachuat z Laboratoire d'Automatique, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Optimization in the process industry has received a lot of attention in recent years because, in the face of growing competition, it represents a natural choice for reducing production costs, improving product quality, and meeting safety requirements and environmental regulations. Traditionally, the optimal operating conditions are determined based on a model of the process. However, the resulting process operation can be highly sensitive to uncertainty such as model mismatch and process disturbances. This generally gives rise to suboptimal process operation or, worse, infeasible operation, which of course is not tolerable in most industrial applications.
Over the last decade, the Laboratoire d'Automatique of EPFL has developed a promising approach that converts a dynamic optimization problem with both path and terminal constraints into a feedback control problem. In this approach, near-optimal process operation is enforced by tracking appropriate references, namely the necessary conditions of optimality (NCO). The NCO-tracking methodology is much appealing in its on-line simplicity and its potential to be
robust towards uncertainty.
This presentation will start with a tutorial overview of dynamic optimization in the presence of uncertainty. Then, a systematic procedure for devising NCO-tracking controllers will be described. Two recent developments in this field will be highlighted, namely:
(i) the ability to track the NCO along interior arcs, be they singular or not;
and
(ii) the ability to detect changing sets of active constraints in a run-to-run manner. These developments will be illustrated through a number of case studies.