Chapter 16 - Control system implementation and plant-wide control of continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing pilot plant (end-to-end manufacturing process)

Abstract

Abstract The integration of unit operations into an end-to-end continuous pharmaceutical process poses new challenges and opportunities for control compared to traditional batch processes. The continuous exchange of material and energy between unit operations call for a process control strategy that starts from the plant as a whole rather than from individual unit operations. This chapter discusses a systematic approach for such plant-wide control. A literature case is discussed, which involves systematic synthesis of the plant-wide control structure and dynamic simulations for validation. Furthermore, a simplified version of the synthesized control structure was applied experimentally to an end-to-end continuous pharmaceutical pilot plant. Finally, the application of more advanced control strategies is discussed for this case involving optimal averaging level control to utilize buffer capacity of mixed tanks in an automated way and MPC to improve control performance and enable the explicit definition of constraints.