Sebastian Engell, TU Dortmund
Optimal resource allocation in industrial complexes by distributed optimization and dynamic pricing
Joint work with Simon Wenzel, Radoslav Paulen, Goran Stojanovski, Stefan Krämer
We address the distributed hierarchical optimization of industrial production complexes where the individual plants exchange resources via networks. Due to the site-wide couplings a centralized or a distributed hierarchical optimization is needed to achieve the best overall performance of the site and to balance the networks of the shared resources. Because of the size of the problem, the sensitivity to missing data and especially the partial autonomy of the management of the units, a centralized solution is infeasible. We discuss market-like algorithms that set prices of the shared resources in order to influence the individual optimizers of the units so that the overall operation converges to the site-wide optimum. Such iterative price adaptation methods are known to converge slowly is a subgradient-based price adaptation scheme is used. In order to speed up convergence, a novel algorithm for price adjustment based on the quadratic approximation of the responses of the individual optimizers is presented. It shows convergence to the site-wide optimum with significantly less iterations in comparison to the standard subgradient-based method. The price-based coordination scheme is demonstrated for a subset of the plants at a petrochemical site.
The research presented here was performed in the context of the project DYMASOS which has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 611281.
Simon Wenzel, Radoslav Paulen and Sebastian Engell are with the Process Dynamics and Operations Group at TU Dortmund, Germany. Goran Stojanovski is with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, Ss Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia. Stefan Krämer is with INEOS Cologne, Germany.
Biography
Sebastian Engell obtained the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Ruhruniversität Bochum in 1978 and a Dr.-Ing. degree and the Habilitation in control from the University of Duisburg, Germany, in 1981 and 1987, respectively. After working for the Fraunhofer Institute IITB in Karlsruhe, Germany as a group leader in process control and production scheduling from 1986 to 1990, he joined Dortmund University in 1990 as a Full Professor for Process Dynamics and Operations in the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund. 2002-2006 he was Vice-Rector for Research of TU Dortmund and in 2005 he was appointed Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control. 2012 he received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant for the project MOBOCON: Model-based optimizing control - from a vision to industrial reality. He is leading the European project DYMASOS on distributed management and optimization of physically coupled systems of systems as well as the Support Action CPSoS which defined a research agenda for cyber-physical systems of systems. He is the coordinator of the recently approved EU SPRIE project CoPro “Improved energy and resource efficiency by better coordination of production in the process industries” which will start in November 2016.
Professional homepage
