Transitions in the process industries: opportunities and prospective solutions

With the increasing emphasis on agile operations, the process industries have begun to focus on effectively managing process transitions. Problems during the operation and control of transitions originate from alarm floods, out-of-spec products, and abnormal situations. Recent research has sought to address these issues albeit in a piece-meal fashion. We review these methods and critically evaluate their strengths and shortcomings. We show that none of the methods can adequately tackle the numerous facets of this complex problem; hence an integrated solution and collaboration among heterogeneous methods is essential. We propose a software agent-based framework as a way to realize this in practice.