Partially Decentralized Control for a Benchmark Boiler

Abstract

Partially decentralized control for a Benchmark Boiler is proposed. First a partially decentralized control structure selection method is proposed based on the gap metric. Since the boiler contains integrating action due to the drum level dynamics, most interaction measures are not applicable here. The gap metric can be used for both stable and unstable systems, so the proposed method can be used for selecting suitable control structure for the boiler. The design of partially decentralized controllers is based on the generalized predictive control method, which overcomes the drawback of the IMC method that requires computing the pseudo-inverse of a non-square matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed partially decentralized control can achieve good performance with a simpler structure.