Concrete batching and mixing plants: A new modeling and control approach based on global automata

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a hybrid model for a concrete batching and mixing plant. The model is sufficiently detailed so as to ensure that it can be used to establish the control system within an industrial monitoring and control framework. Since the concrete batching and mixing plants are hybrid systems, Global Automata were used to build the model of the physical system, since they provide greater “modeling power” being suitable for modeling of a wider variety of systems than other types of automata. Various modeling methods based on the classical hybrid systems theory are rather applied in research works with academic orientation and usually are far from the engineers of industry. A fundamental objective of this work was to adopt a development environment which will be familiar to the industrial people. The developed model entails a hierarchical structure with an automaton as supervisor and several other interactive automata describing the subsystems of the plant. The model was then used to understand the influence of various design and operating parameters on plant performance. The model was also used to establish the control strategy. Both were implemented in a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) environment which monitors and controls the overall operation of the plant. This framework has been applied on a real plant of West Greece with success in all realistic tests concerning either the control operation or the model validation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]