Overall control of fossil-fuel power plants

Under the trend toward market deregulation, effective plant-wide automation systems for operation and control of power units are of paramount importance for the survival and profitable operation of any electric utility. This paper identifies the overall unit control scheme as the core of any integral automation system for fossil-fuel power units and reviews several control strategies towards the implementation of such a scheme. The current trend in the design of overall control systems is shown, and several research niches are pointed out. It is concluded that the general problem of overall power unit control may be recast as the wide-range multi-objective optimal control of a nonlinear multivariable (large-scale) process with highly interactive dynamics, and the trend on the development of overall controls is that of incorporating different techniques into hybrid systems to make use of the good characteristics of each technique in a consistent symbiosis.