APPLICATION OF ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION ON PROCESS CONTROL; FCC CONTROL STRUCTURE

Optimization is an important part of chemical engineering processes, the same as other branches of science. For a long time, many optimization methods have been used which have some advantages and disadvantages. Ability of the optimization algorithm for implementation in nonlinear problems and polynomial execution time are two important characteristics of an algorithm needed for parameters optimization of PIP controller designed for a Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) unit. Modeling of unit is based on Alvarez-Ramirez but with some modifications. To control this process as a MIMO control structure, transfer function of process defined in a NMSS structure then used the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to estimate optimized parameters of weighting matrices. This optimization is based on performance of controller (weighted Sum of Square Error and first derivative of inputs). This paper shows that ACO is a flexible effective algorithm that can be used in all optimization problems.

Keywords:

optimization , ant colony optimization , FCC control