Abstract
Managing production schedules and tracking time-varying demand of certain products while optimizing process economics are subjects of central importance in industrial applications. Production schedule following is generally required for a small subset of the total process state vector. Motivated by this, the present work proposes an approach that targets achieving the desired production schedule while maximizing economics using economic model predictive control (EMPC), which is a feedback control approach that optimizes plant economics in a receding horizon fashion. Conditions for closed-loop stability are derived for a general class of nonlinear systems. The proposed EMPC scheme was applied to a chemical process example where the product concentration was requested to follow a certain production schedule. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EMPC was able to maintain closed-loop stability, achieve the desired production and maximize plant economics.