BFI VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GmbH

Initial situation:

Process industry faces a strong need to increase product quality and reduce operating costs and environmental footprint. A complex plant comprises continuous and/or batch unit processes. The plant’s complexity stems from its dynamic properties, so a plant-wide monitoring and control is a requirement for achieving economically and environmentally efficient operation.

Project targets:

The vision of COCOP is that complex process industry plants will be optimally run by the operators with the guidance of a coordinating, real-time optimisation system. This is reached by enabling plant-wide monitoring and control by using the model-based, predictive, coordinating optimisation concept in integration with local control systems.

The COCOP consortium will research and demonstrate this concept on two pilot cases (copper and steel manufacturing process) and analyse the transferability to other two sectors: the chemical and water treatment processing.

Innovative approaches:

The COCOP project’s concept is based on the decomposition-coordination optimisation of the plant operations: the overall problem is decomposed into unit-level sub-problems, so then the solutions of sub-problems are coordinated to plant-wide optimal schedule using high-level coordination. This will enable operators to understand the functioning of the plant as a whole, including the areas traditionally beyond their control, and take better decisions within their part of the process.

Benefits for the industry:

The use of the solution of the project will allow plant operators to approach optimal production and result in reduced operation costs, reduced energy and resource consumption, and decreased on-site material handling time and greenhouse gas emissions.

Further information about the project: COCOP