Abstract
Promoting process safety of chemical processes while operating them in an economically-optimal manner is a matter of great importance. In Albalawi et al. (2016), a safety-based economic model predictive control methodology (safety-EMPC) was developed to operate nonlinear processes in an economically-optimal manner while maintaining process safety and closed-loop stability. However, the safety-EMPC control strategy was developed with a centralized economic model predictive control (EMPC) structure; thus, computation time limitations within a sampling period may reduce the effectiveness of such a controller design for promoting process safety. Alternatively, we develop in this work sequential and iterative safety based distributed EMPC schemes (safety-DEMPC) that may overcome the computation time limitations of the centralized safety-EMPC while maintaining similar closed-loop performance. Using a catalytic reactor example, the two proposed safety-DEMPC schemes were demonstrated to achieve similar closed-loop performance to the centralized safety-EMPC while reducing the on-line computation time requirements compared to the centralized safety-EMPC. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.