Towards automatic model based controller design for reconfigurable plants

This paper introduces model-based Plug and Play Process Control, a novel concept for process control, which allows a model-based control system to be reconfigured when a sensor or an actuator is plugged into a controlled process. The work reported in this paper focuses on composing a monolithic model from models of a process to be controlled and the actuators and sensors connected to the process, and propagation of tuning criteria from these sub-models, thereby accommodating automatic controller synthesis using existing methods. The developed method is successfully tested on an industrial case study from Danfoss A/S, where the process to be controlled is the indoor temperature of a house and the actuators acting on the process are a floor heating system and an electric radiator.