White water and broke recirculation policies in paper mills via Markovian jump linear quadratic control

With the increasing closure of white water circuits in paper mills, breaks in the sheet of paper have become a systemwide disturbance. Upon recognizing that such breaks can be modelled as a Markov chain type of process which when interacting with the continuous mill dynamics yield a jump Markov model, jump linear theory is proposed as a means of constructing white water and broke recirculation strategies which minimize process variability. A methodology is proposed to choose the performance measure design parameters so as to keep mean time between incidents of fluid in broke and white water tanks overflowing, or reaching dangerously low levels sufficiently long.