This paper is concerned with the real-time optimization (RTO) of chemical plants, i.e., the optimization of the steady-state operating points during operation, based on inaccurate models. Specifically, modifier adaptation is employed to cope with the plant-model mismatch, which corrects the plant model and the constraint functions by bias and gradient correction terms that are computed from measured variables at the steady-states of the plant. This implies that the sampling time of the

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... RTO scheme is lower-bounded by the time to reach a new steady-state after the previously computed inputs were applied. If analytical process measurements (PAT technology) are used to obtain the steady-state responses, time delays occur due to the measurement delay of the PAT device and due to the transportation delay if the samples are transported to the instrument via pipes. This situation is quite common because the PAT devices can often only be installed at a certain distance from the measurement location. The presence of these time delays slows down the iterative real-time optimization, as the time from the application of a new set of inputs to receiving the steady-state information increases further. In this paper, a proactive perturbation scheme is proposed to efficiently utilize the idle time by intelligently scheduling the process inputs taking into account the time delays to obtain the steady-state process measurements. The performance of the proposed proactive perturbation scheme is demonstrated for two examples, the Williams–Otto reactor benchmark and a lithiation process. The simulation results show that the proposed proactive perturbation scheme can speed up the convergence to the true plant optimum significantly.