Complex process plants increasingly appear in modern chemical industry due to the considerable economic efficiency that complex and interactive process designs can offer. These processes often have more than dozens of interconnected process units. Furthermore, there are severe interactions between process units due to material recycles and heat integration, which profoundly alter and complicate plantwide process dynamics. To address the difficulties in plantwide control, distributed control is

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... ecoming a new paradigm, where the distributed controllers determine the control action for subsystems autonomously and communicate with each to coordinate their actions. In contrast to centralized approaches, it significantly reduces the complexity in analysis and control design of plantwide systems.