Chemical Engineering & Chemical Technology, Imperial College London
Doi
Abstract
This thesis presents a formal method for the the design of optimal and provably correct
procedural controllers for chemical processes modelled as Stochastic Discrete Event Systems
(SDESs). The thesis extends previous work on Procedural Control Theory (PCT) [1],
which used formal techniques for the design of automation Discrete Event Systems (DESs).
Many dynamic processes for example, batch operations and the start-up and shut down of
continuous plants, can be modelled as DESs. Controllers for these systems are typically
of the sequential type.
Most prior work on characterizing the behaviour of DESs has been restricted to deterministic
systems. However, DESs consisting of concurrent interacting processes present
a broad spectrum of uncertainty such as uncertainty in the occurrence of events. The
formalism of weighted probabilistic Finite State Machine (wp-FSM) is introduced for
modelling SDESs and pre-de ned failure models are embedded in wp-FSM to describe
and control the abnormal behaviour of systems. The thesis presents e cient algorithms
and procedures for synthesising optimal procedural controllers for such SDESs.
The synthesised optimal controllers for such stochastic systems will take into consideration
probabilities of events occurrence, operation costs and failure costs of events in
making optimal choices in the design of control sequences. The controllers will force the
system from an initial state to one or more goal states with an optimal expected cost and
when feasible drive the system from any state reached after a failure to goal states.
On the practical side, recognising the importance of the needs of the target end
user, the design of a suitable software implementation is completed. The potential of both
the approach and the supporting software are demonstrated by two industry case studies.
Furthermore, the simulation environment gPROMS was used to test whether the operating
speci cations thus designed were met in a combined discrete/continuous environment
