A great wealth Of information concerning advanced control systems
and their design is available in the literature' In actuality the manufacturing industry (continuous, batch, discrete)
is not rich in installed applications of the advanced technologies. Application
is very uneven across industry and within an industry .
The primary manufacturing control problem is still
"how to maintain the process or equipment at the
targeted conditions inspite of interactions and
disturbances". A second major problem is how to
determine what are the best conditions or targets at
which to run the manufacturing system and how to
reach the targets. Thus the primary problem is a
regulatory problem; the secondary is a set of
optimization problems. Control m the manufacturing
industry Falls into two classes: regulation or a
optimization. Regulatory control still Accounts for over
95% of the control situations encountered m
manufacturing. Online Optimal control involving either
the "what" or "how" (both local and plant-wide)
accounts for less than 5% of the installed control
system situations. This paper discusses the results of
applying automated computer-aided design, pattern
recignition,and optimal control to the online
regulatory problem as part of the manufacturing vision
for 2010. The result is an optimal regulatory controller
compatible with the remote downloading of software.