No abstract

In this work the control allocation (CA) philosophy is considered in order to propose a plantwide control (PWC) design methodology. For medium/large-scale processes where the number of actuators is greater than the number of controlled variables, a CA-based strategy can be used to distribute the total control effort among the actuators, with some attractive features. First, the CA module can explicitly handle (i) constraints on inputs (typically actuator position and rate limits), and (ii) additional control objectives (e.g. to penalize the actuators control energy). Second, CA has the potential to provide (actuator) fault tolerance without considering a control structure reconfiguration. In this paper, a decentralized control structure is proposed for computing the total control effort, which is implemented with conventional single-input