Scanning the special section on technologies of large scale and complex systems

摘要

The technical and social systems have reached such dimension and level of complexity that the analysis of such systems and synthesis of the decision support and control systems require employing dedicated technologies. The paper by F.G. Filip on "Decision support and control for large-scale complex systems" gives a survey of historical development of such technologies and describes the state of the art. The hierarchical approach is one of the key technologies and its application to on-line optimizing control of the industrial processes is presented by Piotr Tatjewski in the paper entitled "Advanced control and on-line process optimization in multilayer structures". The main idea is to decompose the original control task into a sequence of simpler and hierarchically structured subtasks, handled by dedicated control layers. There are three basic methods of decomposition, leading to different multilayer or multilayer-multilevel structures: functional decomposition, temporal decomposition and spatial decomposition. The paper considers all of them and applies a mix of linear and nonlinear model predictive control to synthesize the control units of the multilayer structures. Applications to control design for optimized sustainable operation of a biological wastewater treatment plant and to optimizing control of a jacketed continuous stirred tank reactor with the polymerization reaction taking place in the reactor illustrate the underlying theory.