Fractional order PID controller is gaining popularity because the presence of two extra degrees of freedom, which have the potential to meet up the extra degrees in terms of uncertainty, robustness, output controllability .In other words, the fractional order PID controller is the generalization of the conventional PID controller. In the current study, the fractional order PID controller is designed and implemented for the complex and plant-wide processes. Distillation is the most effective separation process in the chemical and petroleum industries but with a drawback of energy intensivity To reduce the energy consumption two distillation columns can be combined into one column, which is known as dividing wall distillation column (DWC).Though the control of DWC has been addressed but it requires further R&D efforts considering the complexity in control of this process In this work the DWC is controlled by the advanced control strategy like fractional order PID controller. One of the challenging field in the process control is to design control system for the entire chemical plant. We have presented the control system for the HDA plant by implementing the fractional order PID controller. Both the discussed processes are multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system and these processes are difficult to tune because of the presence of the interaction between the control loops. For the DWC process, the traditional simplified decoupler is used, while for the HDA plant process the equivalent transfer function model is used to handle the MIMO system. For tuning of the fractional-order PID controllers the optimization techniques have been used. The DWC controllers have been tuned by the ev-MOGA multi objective algorithm and the HDA plant controllers are tuned by the cuckoo search method
