Review of process control adaptation

This paper is based on a tutorial presented at the First Annual Advanced Control Conference, sponsored by Control Engineering magazine and the Purdue Laboratory for Applied Industrial Control. The purpose of this paper is to acquaint the professional audience with some process control adaptive activity and to pose some practical design considerations. After a review of related process control history, three adaptive systems for process control application are offered. The practical issues of adaptive control are examined from technical, system design and operational points of view. The operational issues are both the most crucial to the application of adaptive control and the least understood. The paper concludes with a look at the future of adaptation in terms of direction of technology, broadening of application scope, and the solution of the operational problems.