REAL-TIME MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL UTILITIES SYSTEMS

A system for real-time management and optimisation of industrial utili ties facilities is presented. The system, given the demand from the pr ocess (steam of various levels, power), optimally allocates the load t o the available utilities equipment (boilers, turbines, etc.) and exte rnal sources (national power grid). The utilities plant is considered to consist of three interacting sub-systems: fuel, power, water. The s ystem is based on a modelling framework where operational characterist ics of the utilities equipment are decomposed from nominal design, so that the computational efficiency is increased without loss in rigor. Discontinuities are removed with the introduction of appropriate trans ition functions and the complete problem is formulated in a non-linear programming framework. An industrial scale benchmark problem is used to test the approach. The tests demonstrate the efficiency and robustn ess of the system.