Contents I. Introduction and Problem Statement
There are many types of dynamical processes in the industry, such as chemical, metallurgical and machinery plants, where the equipment operates in a parallel way - as several parallel production lines. Then each line can be viewed as one “channel” or “sub-process” of the whole industrial process. Normally all the channels receive the same input load (such as material flow, energy) and work under the same regime parameters (such as temperature, pressure, rotation speed etc.). The main reason for designing such multichannel production structure is the need to increase the production output of the whole plant or to increase the output power. This is the case of the power generation plants or the case of electric battery, consisting of large number of parallel and serially connected battery cells. Another important reason to design a multichannel structure of the dynamical process is to increase the reliability of the whole production process. Then, if the performance of a certain production line (channel, battery cell) deteriorates significantly from that one of the other parallel lines, it can be safely isolated (shut-down) from the whole production process for maintenance, without shutting-down the whole plant.
