Techniques such as dead time compensation, adaptive control and Kalman filtering have been around for some time, but as yet find little application in industry. This is due to several reasons, including:

• Articles in the literature usually assume that the reader is familiar with a specific topic and are therefore often difficult for the practicing control engineer to comprehend.
• Many practicing control engineers in the process industry have a chemical engineering background and did not receive a control engineering education.
• There is a wide gap between theory and practical implementation, since implementation is primarily concerned with robustness, and theory is not. The user therefore has to build an "expert shell" in order to achieve the desired robustness. Little is published on this issue, however.

This book tries to promote the use of advanced control techniques by taking the reader from basic theory to practical implementation.

Brian Roffel is Global Advisor, Advanced Computer Control at Polysar Limited. He holds a M.Eng in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in process control. He worked as chief senior research officer at the Twente University of Technology, and as a computer applications engineer at Esso Chemical Canada. During 1986-7 he was adjunct professor at the Universities of Western Ontario and Waterloo. He has written many publications on process dynamics and control.

Patrick A. Chin is a Computer Control Specialist at Polysar Limited. He holds a M.Eng. in chemical engineering from McMaster University with a specialization in process control. Previously he worked as a computer applications engineer at Esso Chemical Canada.

1. Introduction 2. Distributed Computer Control System Networks 3. Computer System Software 4. Computer System Selection 5. Reliability and Security 6. Batch and Continuous Process Control 7. Introduction to Advanced Control 8. Dead Time Compensators 9. Inferential Control and Model Identification 10. Feed-Forward Control 11. Interaction and Decoupling 12. Constraint Control 13. Design, Adjustment and Application 14. Optimization 15. Self Tuning and Adaptive Controllers 16. State Observers 17. Kalman Filtering