Reducing energy consumption in an industrial process by using model predictive control

In this paper, we propose to use Model Predictive Control techniques to reduce the energy consumption in an industrial process by incorporating energy consumption restrictions in the problem formulation. We propose to use a Model Predictive Control supervisor to calculate the optimum references for simple control loops regulated by individual PID controllers. The results obtained are compared against those obtained when a traditional control strategy exclusively based on PID controllers was used. By using this supervisory control strategy a reduction on energy consumption of about 10% was achieved.