Advanced Process Control (APC) is an effective lever for improving product quality and increasing productivity, profitability and the environmental sustainability of production plants in the process industry.
Established control concepts in the process industry today still rely predominantly on PID controllers. When automation reaches its limits, it is necessary to resort to manual intervention by the plant operator. However, using APC methods that can mathematically describe even complicated relationships of process parameters, considerably better results can often be achieved.
APC enables unwanted fluctuations of process variables to be reduced and thus enables setpoint values to maintained closer to critical secondary conditions (constraint pushing), without violating these limits. While this reduces the work for the operating personnel, it also enables throughput and product quality to be improved and a noticeable reduction in the use of raw materials and energy consumption.
In the control libraries of SIMATIC PCS 7 the following function blocks and templates are already available for higher-level control functions at no extra cost:
- Gain scheduling
- Override control
- Lead-lag/feed-forward control
- PID controller optimization (PCS 7 PID Tuning)
- Control performance monitoring
- Smith Predictor
- Model-based predictive multi-variable control
Further high-quality closed-loop control functions can be seamless integrated as add-on products into the SIMATIC PCS 7 process control system (for details, see Chapter "Advanced Process Control"):
- FuzzyControl++
- Soft sensors (INCA Sensor)
- Model-predictive multi-variable controller (INCA MPC)
- Extended PID controller optimization (INCA PID Tuner)
- Adaptive controller (ADCO)
Supplementary to this, Siemens offers extensive services for implementing APC solutions with the "Premium Service Advanced Process Control"
- Technical consultation
- Experimental examinations
- Implementation of APC functions
These services are particularly aimed at customers from the pharmaceutical and chemical industry as well as the food and beverages industry.