Objective The working group is concerned with the development of methods and tools for the assessment and benchmarking of advanced control systems for manufacturing industries. The intention is to provide companies with a method of assessing the benefits investment in advanced control might bring and to provide a yardstick against which best practice can be measured.The working group has the following main objectives, - Categorise both existing methods by which companies choose advanced control solutions as well as the different types of advanced control solutions and summarise findings; - Obtain a consensus of opinion by means of a survey and questionnaires on the ways control systems should be assessed and provide guidelines giving a formalised procedure; - Provide a software tool that will enable companies to select appropriate advanced control methods by providing details of their application and specification; - Provide guidelines on benchmarking procedures and undertake case study demonstrators; - Consider the problems of designing multi-level control systems that require different control philosophies at different levels of the hierarchy and develop assessment guidelines for such systems; - Consider the problems of systems integration and assess recent trends. The assessment procedures will cover all availabe 'model based' and 'intelligent control' methods. Consideration will be given as to whether 'expert systems' techniques can be used to simplify assessment procedures. In some process industries like petrochemicals, total plant control and supervisory systems have utilised the latest predictive control technologies leading to claims of savings of over a million ECUs per annum. A less well known property of these techniques is that they can be used to provide a co-ordinated control framework in which are located embedded lower levels of traditional regulator control systems. This project seeks to build on this simple design framework and assess the advanced process supervisory software incorporating new dynamic optimisation, regulator, fault detection and constraint handling modules. A key step in integrating these existing methods is to devise generic production and manufacturing plant benchmark tests and metrics which can be used to define the best control and fault detection techniques to use at the different levels of the global system hierarchy. The benefits of the benchmarking and assessment tools will be assessed by choosing case studies from electrical power equipment/generation industries. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwareengineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systemsnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligenceexpert systemshumanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophy Programme(s) FP4-ESPRIT 4 - Specific research and technological development programme in the field of information technologies, 1994-1998 Topic(s) 8.24 - Best Practice in Manufacturing Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme CSC - Cost-sharing contracts Coordinator UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE EU contribution No data Address 16, Richmond Street GLASGOW United Kingdom See on map Total cost No data