Economic plantwide control of the cumene process over a large throughput range (design to maximum achievable throughput) is studied. The process has 12 steady state operating degrees of freedom (DOFs), which are optimized for maximum hourly profit...

of operation without the need to update the controlled variables (CVs) setpoints or change the control loops. Maximum possible throughput and the bottleneck of the process are found. The self-optimizing CVs are proposed for the optimal operation of this process....