Synthesis of Operating Procedures for Chemical Processes using DES Theory

The synthesis of operating procedures for chemical processes which can be modelled with state-transition structures, is studied using the framework for controllability and supervision introduced by Ramadge and Wonham in [11, 12, 15]. Two modifications are proposed: 1) the modelling formalism is extended to include more information about the states of the system and their precedence; 2) the concept of conditional controllability is introduced to account for a particular class of uncontrollable transitions which appear frequently in chemical process systems. An example is presented to illustrate the ideas.