Cost effective operation of a blast furnace stove system

The problem of optimal control of a blast furnace stove system is revisited. Previous work focused on increasing the thermal efficiency of the system, which implicitly assumes all sources of energy available to the stove system are of equal cost. As the situation is in fact more complex, we reformulate the optimal control problem so that the cost functional more directly reflects the operating expenses of the stove. Of course, thermal efficiency is sacrificed. After a detailed model of the stove system is constructed and identified using plant data, the current control policy and the newly derived optimal control policy are simulated and compared. Depending on how the various energy sources are valued, the new optimal controls reduce operating costs anywhere from 12% to 31% when compared to the current operating policy