Towards agile manufacturing
Nowadays, the ever-increasing market needs impose new demands on production processes including numerous product grades within specified requirements. During production, these products undergo continuous changes involving input quality of feedstock material. At the same time their cost-effective manufacture is a must for their further commercialisation at competitive prices. Current production units with their pre-established infrastructure and processes do not fit well in this dynamic environment. Undesirable consequences include unnecessary resource and energy usage, as well as waste production. In particular, European industries, present a very high changeover frequency in order to remain competitive. Addressing these issues, the INCOOP project focused on the integrated process unit control and plant-wide optimisation. More specifically, the consortium developed software tools for increasing flexibility in terms of fast and cost-effective changeovers of process plants. These tools may additionally improve process efficiency in order to meet the stringent physical and chemical optima specified. On the basis of an existing state of the art product called RTO+® further enhancements allowed the development of the D-RTO prototype. This novelty offers robust process optimisation in dynamic environments for both continuous and batch systems. It has already been used in two applications, a series of stirred tank reactors and batch fermentation. The results showed that D-RTO could significantly contribute to the improvement of the plant operation in both cases.
