Model Based Predictive Control of An Olive Oil Mill

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Model based predictive control of an olive oil mill
Received 10 October 2006; received in revised form 9 March 2007; accepted 8 April 2007
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16 Keywords: Olive oil; Process control; Predictive control; Food Engineering 17
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This paper presents the application of model based predictive techniques to an olive oil mill. The work presents a solution to the integrated control of the mill, where a predictive strategy has been used to optimize oil yield while keeping quality standards. The work includes multivariable identication as well as the implementation of a predictive controller on the real plant, taking into account operating constraints that appear in this process. The work also shows the application problems that arise when implementing advanced controllers in an industrial control system with low computational capabilities. The application of the proposed control strategy to an actual olive oil plant has shown that great benets can be obtained both in oil yield and extraction performance. 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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The automatic control of the extraction of oil out of olives is still an open eld, since there are still many installations operated in manual mode. As olive oil mills are becoming bigger the chances for automation are increasing, therefore it is important to acquire the necessary knowledge of the process behavior in order to design the appropriate control strategies. The objective of this paper is to propose a control strategy that facilitates the maximization of the oil yield while keeping the quality of the nal product. The proposed control strategy is based on model predictive control (MPC) (Camacho & Bordons, 2004; Maciejowski, 2002; Rossiter, 2003), which is considered as the most popular advanced control technique in industry, due to its ability to operate the process in such a way that multiple and changing operational criteria (economical, safety, environmental or quality) can be fullled in the presence of changes in process
Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 954 487348; fax: +34 954 487340. E-mail addresses: bordons@esi.us.es (C. Bordons), amparo@cartu ja.us.es (A. Nunez-Reyes). 0260-8774/$ - see front matter 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2007.04.011
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Please cite this article in press as: Bordons, C., & Nunez-Reyes, A. Model based predictive control of an olive oil mill, Journal of Food , Engineering (2007), doi:10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2007.04.011
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18 1. Introduction
characteristics. Model predictive control has been used to control several industrial processes (Qin & Badgwell, 2003) and its basic idea is to calculate a sequence of future control signals in such a way that it minimises a multistage cost function dened over a control horizon. The index to be optimized is normally the expectation of a function measuring the distance between the predicted system output and some predicted reference sequence over the control horizon plus a function measuring the control eort over the same horizon. A model of the plant is used to predict the future outputs based on past and current values of the input and the output of the plant. The number of olive oils mills in a country such as Spain (biggest producer worldwide) was around 1800 in 2006 (Aguilera & Ortega, 2005; Ministerio de Agricultura, 2007), and many of them have a net production of around 20 hundred tons of oil per day. In spite of this, there are no reports about the penetration of automation technologies in this sector, although the current state depicted in a survey of automation practices in the food industry (Ilyukhin, Haley, & Singh, 2001) can be extrapolated to the olive oil sector. There are some references related to the automation of one of the plants that appear in this industry: a rotary
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Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Automatica, Escuela Superior de Ingenieros, Universidad de Sevilla, Camino de los descubrimientos s/n, 41092 Seville, Spain
Carlos Bordons *, Amparo Nunez-Reyes
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The elaboration of olive oil is achieved by extracting oil out of olives purely by mechanical means, without chemical reactions. All the operations that are performed are aimed at extracting the maximum quantity of juice of the raw material without losing quality. In order to do that, the process is composed of several operations: reception of raw material (olives), washing, preparation, extraction, and storage of the produced oil. Fig. 1 shows the most important phases of the process, whose description can be found in Civantos (1999), Furferi, Carfagni, and Daoub (2007) or Piacquadio, De Stefano, and Sciancalepore (1998). The preparation phase consists of two subprocesses. The rst one is olive crushing by an special mill, whose objec-
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dryer. Modeling of an olive cake thin-layer drying process can be found in Akgun and Ibrahim (2005), while (Arjona, Ollero, & Vidal, 2005; Perez-Correa, Cubillos, Zavala, Shene, & Alvarez, 1998) present two proposals for the automatic control of the dryer. In many olive oil mills the process is controlled manually or with single control loops that maintain some ows and temperatures at constant values, since there are many factors that aect production. There are many objectives to be fullled and operators must use their experience to have the process under control. The objective of this work is to develop a control scheme based on model based predictive control, where a predictive strategy is used to optimize oil yield while keeping quality standards. Notice that quality of the oil highly depends on agronomic parameters (Del Caro, Vacca, Poiana, Fenu, & Piga, 2006) and that a good control strategy must operate the plant in such a way that the quality is not lost during the elaboration process, at the same time that oil yield is maximized. The work presented here tries to show that advanced control techniques can be successfully applied in the olive oil industry providing great benets in oil yield increase as well as in extraction performance improvement, without the need of a great investment in new machinery.
tive is to destroy the olive cells where oil is stored. The second one aims at homogenizing the paste by revolving it while its temperature is kept constant at a specied value (around 35 C). This is performed in a machine called thermomixer, which homogenizes the three phases of the paste (oil, water and by-product (alpeorujo)) while exchanging energy with surrounding pipes of hot water. This is done in order to facilitate oil extraction in the mechanical separator. The operation conditions in the thermomixer are really important since they can dramatically aect the quality and quantity of the nal product. As a good homogenization is needed, the paste is heated in order to facilitate mixing, since the paste turns more uent when temperature rises. But there is an upper temperature limit behind which olive oil loses quality (avour, fragrance, etc.) due to the oxidation process and the loss of volatile components. Therefore, keeping low values of temperature will be a high-priority objective. The next stage is based on the separation of the product phases by means of a centrifuge. This is a continuous process which separates the dierent components that constitute the paste by means of centrifugal force. This separation is made in the horizontal centrifuge or decanter, that separates olive oil from by-product. In order to perform a good separation, the paste that enters the decanter must be accommodated. Its ow must be controlled to a set-point that depends on operating conditions and some water must be added depending on the properties of the raw material. Finally, the last stage of the system consists of the storage and the conservation of the obtained oil. The nal product quality and the industrial yield are inuenced by dierent process variables. For instance: temperature in the thermomixer, residence time, paste consistency, paste ow to decanter and water ow to decanter. The experiments have been carried out in a medium-size olive oil mill located at the village of Rus, in the province of Jaen (Spain). The main variable to be controlled is olive oil ow. The objective is to obtain the maximum yield but without aecting product quality. It implies that some operational constraints have to be fullled.
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Paste pump Mill Thermomixer Olive Oil By-product
Fig. 1. Olive oil mill process description.
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137 3. Automation in the olive oil industry 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 In many olive oil mills the process is controlled almost manually, using operators expertise to keep the process under control (Aguilera & Ortega, 2005). Automation can solve operating problems in three crucial zones of the mill: in the raw material receiving and inspection area (called patio), in the extraction line and in the warehouse area (bodega). In the rst and third areas, the improvement can be achieved by adequate strategies of information management, inventory and quality control as done in other processes of the food industry (Ilyukhin et al., 2001). Some promising results have been obtained by the use of analytical methods (mainly Near Infra Red spectroscopy, NIR) for control, as shown in the report by Jimenez, Molina, and Pascual (2005), which presents on-line quality control and characterization of virgin olive oil. Real-time software for the estimation of acidity level and of peroxides number is presented in Furferi et al. (2007). Although these on-line analytical methods are usually employed for quality analysis and detection of potential adulterants, they can be helpful for feedback control. The place where a major benet can be obtained by the use of a control system is the extraction line, which is the production unit inside the mill. But up to now only supervision and basic control is usually done. In the majority of mills, several variables are measured and sent to an industrial controller, usually a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) which processes them and present useful information to the operator, who decides which are the better decisions to make at each moment. In some mills, the PLC is also in charge of the automatic control of basic loops such as ows and temperatures. In this situation, the operator
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selects the desired set-point for a certain variable (thermomixer temperature, for instance) and a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller drives this variable to the selected value, trying to reject external disturbances. These basic control loops are crucial for the optimization of the extraction process, since they constitute the low-level layer that can be used by the optimization procedure, as shown below. The loops that are usually controlled are: paste temperature in the thermomixer, ow of addition water, temperature of addition water, paste ow, paste moisture and mixing (residence) time. In this work, an optimization module is added as a high-level layer that computes the optimal set-points for the PIDs minimizing a cost function, as will be shown bellow. This is done by a multivariable predictive controller that is described in next section.
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4. Control system
4.1. Control scheme
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Several variables take part in the process of oil extraction out of olives. The nal product quality and the industrial yield are inuenced by dierent process variables, being the most important the following ones, which are marked in the P&I scheme (Fig. 2): Temperature in the thermomixer. The heating of the paste has to be constant and gradual since abrupt changes aect negatively the quality of the nal product. Two main diculties appear: the rst one is the existence of large delays due to the thermal nature of the process and the second one is caused by the on-o mech-
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The control strategy that is proposed in this work to control the olive oil mill can be seen as two control levels in a cascade structure (see Fig. 3). A multivariable constrained model predictive control was implemented to track the oil ow to a desired reference, modifying the manipulated variables that are the setpoints to the basic control loops mentioned in Section 3, that operate with classical monovariable PID controllers. The industrial implementation of MPC has shown the importance of including economical and control objectives in the oil production system (Scheer-Dutra, Nunez Reyes, & Bordons, 2002).
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Heating water valve in the thermomixer. This 3-way valve allows temperature control inside this unit by letting hot water circulate around the jacket; Paste pump. It manages the ow of paste that is sent to the decanter; Water pump. It controls the quantity of additional water that is mixed with the paste at the decanter input.
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The product yield (olive oil ow) is the controlled variable, which is a noisy measurement which has to be pre-processed before being used for feedback. In many olive oil mills the process is controlled manually, since there are many factors that aect production. There are many objectives to be fullled and operators must use their experience to have the process under control. This situation justies the use of a multivariable predictive controller that is able to manipulate several actuators in order to obtain the desired performance. The control algorithm is described in next section. The control system can manipulate the following actuators:
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anism of feeding the paste. These diculties can deteriorate the performance of the local temperature controller, which is usually a PID. Other advanced control algorithms can be used to overcome this problem (Bordons & Cueli, 2004); Residence time. Another important fact to be considered is the mixing time (residence time) inside the thermomixer. A short time drives to incomplete mixing and a long one can give rise to emulsions, which interfere with the extraction process; Paste ow to decanter. The paste addition to decanter and the water/mass ratio determine the maximum industrial yield. The mass ow is adjustable according to the olive type; Water ow to decanter. This also determines the extraction eectiveness. The amount of water that is introduced in the decanter must be constant; that is, the sum of the vegetation water of the olive plus the added water must be constant. The raw material does not contain a homogeneous moisture (Furferi et al., 2007), which forces that the water ow must be continually adjusted in order to obtain the maximum oil in the decanter. The temperature of this water also inuences extraction.
Optimizer: Model Predictive Controller
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4.2. Control system hardware An integrated platform for the control and automation of the oil mill production has been used, that consists of a PLC connected to a PLC where the supervisory and optimizing control is executed. The PID controllers that constitute the low-level layer of the control system have been implemented in the PLC. A PC with an SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) serves as a man machine interface, where the operator can visualize the evolution of the dierent variables and can act on the process. Most of the process information is provided to the SCADA by means of a local network that connects the PC to the PLC. The PLC is also responsible for the starting up and shutting down procedures, and for the management of alarms and emergency shutdown. The optimizing control (high-level layer) that computes the setpoints of the basic loops is programmed in a high-level programming language (C++) and runs on a separate PC connected through a local network. The control of the olive oil mill is a complex problem with a signicant number of variables whose operation characteristics depend on olive properties. The multivariable process has three inputs (paste temperature, paste ow and water ow) and one output (olive oil ow). The system is characterized by long dead-times, constraints and disturbances. The main disturbances are related to incoming olives, whose properties (moisture and oil content) can be measured in some situations and can therefore be considered as measurable disturbances. 4.3. Model predictive control Model predictive control (MPC) is a good candidate for the high-level layer of the control strategy. This technique has been successfully used in many applications in the process industry and it has also been proposed in other food
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processes. The survey (Qin & Badgwell, 2003) enumerates some MPC applications in the food industry and it includes discussion of model predictive control in this sector. Didriksen (2002) reports simulation results of the application of this technique to a sugar beet rotary dryer. An interesting application of MPC to other edible oils processing industries can be found in Wills and Heath (2005) where multivariable predictive control is used to reduce variations in the ow and back-pressure associated with two industrial separator units forming part of an edible oil rening line. That process is similar to the one presented here, although the controlled and manipulated variables are not the same. Model predictive control designates a control method which makes explicit use of a model of the process to obtain the control signal by minimising an objective function. The basic concepts of MPC are: explicit use of a model to predict the process output at future time instants (horizon); calculation of a control sequence minimising an objective function; and receding strategy, so that at each instant the horizon is displaced towards the future, which involves the application of the rst control signal of the sequence calculated at each step.
plant output y(t + j) is driven close to ymax(t + j). Notice that u(t) is a vector that has three components: u1(t), u2(t) and u3(t), since this process is multivariable. For a detailed explanation of the MPC algorithm, see for instance (Camacho & Bordons, 2004). The objective is accomplished by minimising J of Eq. (1) and then the problem can be formulated as min subject to : J U min 2 U min 3 U min 6 u1 t j 6 U max ; 1 1 j 0; 1; . . . ; N u j 0; 1; . . . ; N u j 0; 1; . . . ; N u
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being and the minimum and maximum amplitude values, respectively, of the manipulated variables. For this plant, giving the design and operating conditions, these limits are given by 2 3 2 3 25 36 6 6 7 7 U min 4 3200 5; U max 4 3600 5 2 The introduction of constraints in the design phase allows to keep the thermomixer temperature as near as possible to the optimum value to guarantee the best oil characteristics, to keep the paste ow as close as possible to the operator reference (reduce the necessary ow) as well as to reduce the water ow necessary in the production. Notice that the use of constraints is crucial, since it allows to keep the quality of the produced oil. The choice of the tuning parameters is based on the common rules used in practice, see for instance (Qin & Badgwell, 2003). The minimum prediction horizon N1 is set to the smallest dead time of the plant, which is this case is N1 = 4. The value of the horizon N2 is a basic tuning parameter and is generally set long enough to capture the steady-state eects of all computed future control moves; in this case it has been set to N2 = 40. Notice that this parameter is also related to closed loop stability in the sense that long horizons improve stability (Maciejowski, 2002). The control horizon is set to a smaller value (Nu = 10) in order to facilitate implementation, since its value sets the number of decision variables to be solved in the on-line optimization problem. The control weighting matrix has been set to 2 3 170 0 0 6 7 K4 0 1:5 0 5 0 0 15 Their values are chosen so that the terms in the objective function (1) corresponding to the three manipulated variables have similar values, in spite of their dierent ranges (seen in Eq. (2)). Notice that there are no o-diagonal elements since, in this application, the crossed weights have no physical meaning.
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Other control techniques could also have considered as candidates to tackle the problem, but MPC is a good solution since it integrates multivariable control and on-line optimization. The predictive strategy that is used in this work includes measurable disturbances, constraints on the amplitude and speed of the manipulated variables and amplitude limits in the controlled variable. There exist operating limitations since temperature must be kept inside a range, out of which the quality of the product is drastically reduced. Therefore, the controller must compute the control actions (u1, u2 and u3 as described in Section 4.1) in order to get the maximum oil ow (ymax) taking into account the operational constraints described above. The algorithm consists of applying a control sequence that minimizes a multistage cost function of the form
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where ^t jjt is an optimum j step ahead prediction of y the system output on data up to time t, N1 and N2 are the minimum and maximum costing horizons, Nu is the control horizon, K is the control weighting matrix and t is the current time instant. The objective of predictive control is to compute the future control sequence u(t), u(t + 1), . . . , u(t + Nu 1) in such a way that the future
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Since the cost function is quadratic and constraints are linear, this is a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem, that must be solved at every sampling instant. Notice that welltested and ecient algorithms to solve this are available in the market.
was obtained from a series of tests performed in the plant during one year. These data have been treated (ltered, sampled, normalized) suitably to reach an acceptable model. A model with the following discrete time linear transfer function (or transfer operator, see e.g. Ljung (1999)) is used yt Gz1 ut Gd z1 dt denotes the backward shift operator, i.e. where z y(t)z1 = y(t 1) and t stands for the current discrete time instant. The controlled variable y(t) is the oil ow, u(t) is the vector of manipulated variables u1(t), u2(t) and u3(t) which are, respectively, the temperature in the thermomixer set-point, the paste ow set-point and the water ow setpoint. The measurable disturbance d(t) is a measurement of oil content in the paste, which is available in some olive oil mills. This measurable disturbance has a great inuence in the performance, because it represents the properties of the olive inlet at the thermomixer. The process matrix fraction description is given by 2 3 u1 t 6 7 yt G1 z1 G2 z1 G3 z1 4 u2 t 5 Gd z1 dt u3 t
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397 4.4. Model identication 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 The optimization strategy is based on the dynamic model of the process, therefore the identication of the plant model is needed before the optimization can be done. The process model plays, in consequence, a decisive role in the controller. The chosen model must be able to capture the process dynamics to precisely predict the future outputs and be simple to implement and understand. Most processes in industry when considering small changes around an operating point can be described by a linear model of, normally, very high order. These models would be dicult too use for control purpose but, fortunately, it is possible to approximate the behavior of such high-order processes by a system with one time constant and a dead time (Bordons & Camacho, 1998). This is the type of model that is used for identication. In order to identify the parameters of the transfer functions that relate process inputs and output, input variables have been excited with dierent steps. The parameters of the system model are determined by recursive least squares estimation (Ljung, 1999). This model has been validated using real data obtained from the actual olive oil mill. Data
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Each matrix Gi corresponds to a rst order system with 441 dead time of the form 442 Gi z1 bi z1 d i z ; 1 ai z1 i 1; 2; 3 444
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being ai the pole, bi the zero and di the discretized dead time. The accuracy of the model tness to real data can be seen in Fig. 4. Better results could be obtained with higher-order models, but paying the cost of losing simplicity. To get more information about the plant model identication, see Scheer-Dutra et al. (2002).
452 5. Experimental results 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 Several experiments have been performed on the real plant to show the behavior of the proposed controller. Fig. 5 shows the behavior of the oil ow, y(t), when controlled by the proposed strategy, starting at instant 2850. It can be seen that the ow is kept around a constant value (dashed line), that is the maximum that can be obtained taking into account the characteristics of the incoming olives. It is possible to observe how the output signal reaches the desired set-point. Constraints and disturbance have been satised and compensated respectively by the control action. This behavior is achieved by manipulating the set-points of the low-level control layer. Fig. 6 shows the set-points that are computed by the MPC at each sampling time (u1, u2 and u3). Notice that these values are computed solving the QP problem at every sampling time. This optimization problem takes operational constraints into account, such as thermomixer temperature, which has a great inuence in
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product quality. The upper graph of Fig. 6 clearly shows that this value is always below the maximum temperature constraint limit (dashed line). Fig. 7 presents the PIDs performance in the same experiment (dashed lines are the set-points and solid lines the PIDs controlled variables). The water ow and the paste ow show good behavior in set-point tracking while the thermomixer temperature may have en error of around 1 C around the reference. This is due to the big dead time of the variable and the changes in the level of the thermomixer. The control can be improved by the use of another predictive controller instead of the PID in this loop, as has been done in Bordons and Cueli (2004). That paper shows how a careful identication process followed by a predictive strategy that takes measurable disturbances into account can achieve a good regulatory control for the thermomixer temperature loop. The process behavior has been improved with respect to the usual way of operating this plant, in which the operator used to make decisions based on his experience, acting on the set-points of the low-level control loops, that is, without the MPC. Fig. 8 shows the evolution of olive oil yield under existing control, showing worse behavior that under the proposed control strategy (Fig. 5) in terms of signal variance. In fact, the graphs correspond to two dierent days and the operating conditions (disturbances, olives, etc.) may not be exactly the same, but the benet of the proposed control is evident. This will be quantied in next section.
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Daily production: tons of olives that enter the mill per 24 h. It is a clear indicator of the plant capacity; Extraction performance: dened as the ratio of oil produced divided by the quantity of incoming olives. It is the indicator of good operating practices in the plant. It must be as high as possible; Byproduct oil content: is the quantity of oil that is not extracted in the mill, expressed as percentage of oil in the dry byproduct (called alperujo). Although this oil can be recovered later by chemical means, the benet is lower since it is a low-quality oil. It must be as low as possible;
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502 This section presents the main operating results 503 obtained when the proposed control scheme was applied 504 during one season in the olive oil mill. Four key indicators 505 are analyzed:
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Olive oil yield: tons of oil produced every day. It is a 518 clear indicator of the plant production. 519 The results come from analysis performed by independent laboratories: Laboratorio particular de Analisis Agrarios, located at Ubeda, Atres, Calidad y Medio Ambiente, S.C.A., located at Torredonjimeno and Ecologia del olivar at Menjibar, all of them in Jaen, Spain. Table 1 compares these key indicators for the 20042005 and 20052006 seasons. Notice that the dierence between these seasons also depend on other factors (weather, time of harvest, state of maturity) that depend on the own fruit and agronomic practice and not on the process, and consequently can vary year on year. During the 20042005 season a basic control system already existed, with basic control loops whose set-points were set by the operator. The proposed control strategy including the high-level control layer was implemented in the 20052006 season. Therefore Table 1 compares the 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535
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Table 1 Comparison of manual and automatic control operation Indicator Daily production (tons per 24 h) Extraction performance (%) Byproduct oil content (%) Olive oil yield (tons per 24 h) 20042005 75.2 21.15 2.65 14.8 20052006 84.5 21.62 2.01 18.3
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results of an improvement of the control system (mainly software) over a plant with an existing basic automation, that is, not completely manual. The second row of the table shows that the daily production was substantially incremented (from 75.2 to 84.5 tons per day). This is great benet taking into account that the new control scheme has almost no additional cost since the main investment on the control system (hardware) was already done. The third row shows the improvement achieved on extraction performance. The dierence is not so big since this oil mill had a good performance on the 20042005 season, similar to the average of the zone, which was 21.1% (de Agricultura, 2004). Anyway, this value is very high compared to those obtained in other countries where automation practices are not widely spread; for instance, in Argentina the average in 2004 was 14% (Ministerio de
Economia, 2004). The use of the proposed controller has raised this value in order of 0.5, producing a big economical prot to the mill. The reduction achieved in the byproduct oil content is near the technological limit. The value obtained is very low, indicating that the maximum oil yield (objective to be met by the optimization) has been fullled. Notice that the limit depends on the characteristics of the incoming olives. This value is lower at the beginning of the season than at the end. The following gures show daily values of this key indicators during 61 days. Fig. 9 shows the evolution of the extraction performance during the season that, with an average value of 21.62 can reach values as good as 23.5 some days. The daily evolution of the byproduct oil content is depicted in Fig. 10. Note that during the rst three weeks this variable is kept under 2%, which is an excellent value. The daily evolution of the quantity of crushed olives is drawn in Fig. 11. Notice that good automation practices reduce the wasted time associated to shut-down and start-up. However, some of the shut-downs cannot be avoided since they are due to the lack of incoming olives. An average value of 84.5 is obtained for this mill that, with the same machinery, could crush only 75.2 tons the previous season (see Fig. 12).
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Daily values from 3 Dec 2005 to 31 Jan 2006
Fig. 9. Evolution of the extraction performance during the season.
Byproduct oil content (%)
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2.8 2.6 2.4 2.2
2 1.8 1.6 1.4
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Fig. 10. Evolution of the byproduct oil content during the season
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Daily production kg of olives)
10 8 6 4 2 0
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Daily values from 3 Dec 2005 to 31Jan 2006
Fig. 11. Evolution of the quantity of crushed olives during the season.
2.5 x10
Olive oil yield (kg)
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Fig. 12. Evolution of the oil yield during the season.
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The last gure shows the quantity of oil produced in the mill, which gives the main prot. Note that this quantity is small at the beginning of the season, when small amount of olives come to the mill and increases along the year. The increment of oil yield as a consequence of the proposed control scheme is not only due to the increment in the extraction performance, but also to the capability of the control system to keep the mill operating in stable conditions for a longer time. The previous gures have shown that all the key indicators have been improved, especially olive oil yield, which results in an economical prot.
by PIDs running on the PLC and the high-level control computes the optimal setpoints to be transferred to the PIDs. This allows a safe operation even in case that the cascade structure is broken. The application of the proposed control strategy to an actual olive oil plant has shown that great benets can be obtained both in oil yield and extraction performance. Notice that this improvement from the previous season is done with the same machinery, which implies that no additional investment is needed. The optimization algorithm also reduces energy and water consumption, since ows and temperatures are constrained. Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology for funding the work under Grant DPI2004-07444-C04-01 and Francisco Carta and Juan Hermida for their help in the application of the technique to the actual oil mill. References
Aguilera, D., & Ortega, J. G. (2005). Automation of the live oil extraction process Survey of the province of Jaen (Spain). In XXV Jornadas de Automatica. Alicante, Spain.
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This work has presented an application of model predictive control to an olive oil mill. Thanks to this control strategy, the yield of oil can be optimized without losing product quality. This is achieved by means of a two-level control strategy that takes operation constraints into account. Information from the incoming raw material is included as a measurable disturbance allowing the process to rapidly adapt to changes in operating conditions. The results show that this advanced control strategy can be implemented in simple industrial control systems by using a cascade structure where the basic control is done
Please cite this article in press as: Bordons, C., & Nunez-Reyes, A. (2005) Model based predictive control of an olive oil mill, Journal , of Food Engineering (2007), doi:10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2007.04.011
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Akgun, Alan. A., & Ibrahim, Doymaz (2005). Modelling of olive cake thin-layer drying process. Journal of Food Engineering, 68(4), 455461. Arjona, R., Ollero, P., & Vidal, F. (2005). Automation of an olive waste industrial rotary dryer. Journal of Food Engineering, 68(2), 239247. Bordons, C., & Camacho, E. F. (1998). Generalized predictive controller for a wide class of industrial process. IEEE Transaction on Control Systems Technology, 6(3), 372387. Bordons, C., & Cueli, J. R. (2004). Predictive controller with estimation of measurable disturbances. Application to an olive oil mill. Journal of Process Control, 14(3), 305315. Camacho, E. F., & Bordons, C. (2004). Model predictive control in the process industry (2nd ed.). London: Springer-Verlag. Civantos, L. (1999). Elaboration of virgin olive oil (in Spanish). Agrcola Espanola, S.A. de Agricultura y Pesca, Consejeria (2004). Informe del rendimiento de las almazaras de la zona Las Lomas. Junta de Andalucia. Del Caro, A., Vacca, V., Poiana, M., Fenu, P., & Piga, A. (2006). Inuence of technology, storage and exposure on components of extra virgin olive oil from whole and de-stoned fruits. Food Chemistry, 98(2), 311316. Didriksen, H. (2002). Model based predictive control of a rotary dryer. Chemical Engineering Journal, 86, 5360. Furferi, R., Carfagni, M., & Daoub, M. (2007). Articial neural network software for real-time estimation of olive oil qualitative parameters during continuous extraction. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 55, 115131. Ilyukhin, S. V., Haley, T. A., & Singh, R. K. (2001). A survey of automation practices in the food industry. Food Control, 12, 285296.
Jimenez, A., Molina, A., & Pascual, M. I. (2005). Using optical NIR sensor for on-line virgin olive oils characterization. Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, 107, 6468. Ljung, L. (1999). System identication (2nd ed). New Jersey: Prentice Hall Information and System Sciences Series. Maciejowski, J. M. (2002). Predictive control with constraints. PrenticeHall. Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentacion 2007. Report Agencia para el Aceite de Oliva, february 2007. http://aao.mapa.es/. Ministerio de Economia y Produccion (2004). Informe Olivicola mayo 2004. Secretara de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentos (Argentina). Perez-Correa, J., Cubillos, F., Zavala, E., Shene, C., & Alvarez, P. (1998). Dynamic simulation and control of direct rotary dryers. Food Control, 9(4), 195203. Piacquadio, P., De Stefano, G., & Sciancalepore, V. (1998). Quality of virgin olive oil extracted with the new centrifugation system using a two-phases decanter. Fett/Lipid, 10, 472474. Qin, S. J., & Badgwell, T. A. (2003). A survey of industrial model predictive control technology. Control Engineering Practice, 11, 733764. Rossiter, J. A. (2003). Model-based predictive control: A practical approach. CRC Press. Scheer-Dutra, C. B., Nunez Reyes, A., & Bordons, C. (2002). Predictive control of an olive oil mill with multi-objective prioritisation. In: Proceedings of the IFAC triennal world congress. Barcelona, Spain. Wills, A. G., & Heath, W. P. (2005). Application of barrier function based model predictive control to an edible oil rening process. Journal of Process Control, 15, 183200.
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