Plenary Lectures - International Conference on Process Control

Plenary Lectures:

Morten Hovd (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway): Integrator use and abuse
Petr Havel (Optimwise, s.r.o., Czech Republic): Practical Experience with Application of Process Control in Industrial Plants

Semi-Plenary Lectures:

Best Paper Award: To be announced
Best Paper by Female Researcher Award: To be announced
Best Paper by Young Author Award: To be announced

Plenary Lecture I

Title: Integrator use and abuse

by Morten Hovd (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)

ABSTRACT: The use of integral action to achieve offset-free control at steady state is covered in most introductory courses to control. Still, there remains misconceptions concerning the proper use of integral action – at least when considering more complex control than the basic stand-alone single loop control. The talk will address a number of different situations in which integral action is used – and in which the presenter has encountered serious misunderstandings in interaction with industry or academia. The talk will address such misunderstandings, starting with cases only slightly more complex than single-loop control, via more complex control applications, to model predictive control.

Bio: Morten Hovd holds a BSc (Hons) in Natural Gas Engineering from the University of Salford (UK) and a Dr. Ing. (PhD) in Process Control from the University of Trondheim (now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU). After a few years in industry, mainly in oil & gas and pulp & paper, Hovd took up his present position as professor of process control at the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at NTNU in 1998. Hovd has authored more than 150 papers and the textbook Advanced Chemical Process Control. Putting Theory into Practice (Wiley-VCH, 2023). His main scientific interests are in control structure design, control performance monitoring, optimization-based control (including MPC), and control applications.

Plenary Lecture II

Title: Practical Experience with Application of Process Control in Industrial Plants

by Petr Havel (Optimwise, s.r.o., Czech Republic)

ABSTRACT: The speaker would like to share his own experience with application of process control in industrial production sites, point out typical project phases and related pitfalls when implementing (advanced) control and optimization strategies, and emphasize which soft skills are necessary for successful completion of such a job besides knowledge of control and optimization theory.

Bio: Petr Havel received both MSc and PhD in Control Engineering and Robotics from the Czech Technical University in Prague. He began his career as a researcher at the Center for Applied Cybernetics and then followed his desire to apply process control and optimization in industry. After gaining valuable experience, he founded his own company, Optimwise, s.r.o., which now delivers smart and advanced solutions in automatic process control and optimization to customers in 13 countries. His main interests are process modelling using bond graphs, predictive control and production scheduling using mathematical optimization.