Springer Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes (Advances in Industrial Control)

This book reviews current design paths for soft sensors, and guides readers in evaluating different choices. The book presents case studies resulting from collaborations between the authors and industrial partners. The solutions presented, some of which are implemented on-line in industrial plants, are designed to cope with a wide range of applications from measuring system backup and what-if analysis through real-time prediction for plant control to sensor diagnosis and validation. Review From the reviews: "The monograph is devoted to design procedure of soft sensors and their applications for solving some industrial problems. … The monograph highlights the importance of using knowledge from industrial experts and from the existing industrial process literature. It is full of valuable information about the veracity of different methods. The monograph will be appreciated by the industrial control engineer for its practical insights and by the academic staff for its case-study applications."(Tadeusz Kaczorek, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1136 (14), 2008) From the Back Cover Soft sensors are inferential estimators, drawing conclusions from process observations when hardware sensors are unavailable or unsuitable; they have an important auxiliary role in sensor validation when performance declines through senescence or fault accumulation. The non-linear behaviour exhibited by many industrial processes can be usefully modelled with the techniques of computational intelligence: neural networks; fuzzy systems and nonlinear partial least squares. Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes underlines the real usefulness of each approach and the sensitivity of the individual steps in soft-sensor design to the choice of one or the other. Design paths are suggested and readers shown how to evaluate the effects of their choices. All the case studies reported, resulting from collaborations between the authors and a number of industrial partners, raised challenging soft-sensor-design problems. The applications of soft sensors presented in this volume are designed to cope with the whole range from measuring system backup and what-if analysis through real-time prediction for plant control to sensor diagnosis and validation. Some of the soft sensors developed here are implemented on-line at industrial plants. Features: • soft-sensor design; • advice on data selection and choice of model structure; • model validation; • strategies for the improvement of soft-sensor performance; • uses of soft sensors in fault detection and sensor validation; • soft sensors in use in industrial applications such as a debutanizer column and a sulfur recovery unit. This monograph guides interested readers – researchers, graduate students and industrial process technologists – through the design of their own soft sensors. It is self-contained with full references and appraisal of existing literature and data sets for some of the case studies can be downloaded from springer.com.     Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control. About the Author Luigi Fortuna has been Professor of System Theory at the University of Catania since 1994. He has published more than 280 technical papers and is co-author of seven books including, for Springer, Soft Computing (1-85233-308-1, 2001, 280 pp, SC) and Microelectronics and Microsystems (1-85233-499-1, 2001, 222 pp, HC). He holds several USA patents. His scientific interests include automatic control, nonlinear science and complexity, chaos, cellular neural networks with applications in bioengineering. He has been an IEEE Fellow since 2000. Salvatore Graziani rece