Neural control of a batch distillation

The purpose of the work reported here was to investigate the application of neural control to a common industrial process. The chosen problem was the control of a batch distillation. In the first phase towards deployment, a complex software simulation of the process was controlled. Initially, the plant was modelled with a neural emulator. The neural emulator was used to train a neural controller using the backpropagation through time algorithm. A high accuracy was achieved with the emulator after a large number of training epochs. The controller converged more rapidly, but its performance varied more widely over its operating range. However, the controlled system was relatively robust to changes in ambient conditions.