Object-Oriented Modeling and Optimal Control: A Case Study in Power Plant Start-Up

Författare

Francesco Casella
Filippo Donida
Johan Åkesson

Summary, in English

Modeling and optimization of complex systems traditionally have required significant programming efforts in order to encode the model dynamics, the cost functions and the constraints in a format suitable for state of the art numerical algorithms. The availability of dedicated languages for physical modeling has made the design process simpler, but often tools have been limited to a particular optimization algorithm. In this paper, we present a case study where a combined cycle power plant model has been developed using first principles in the modeling language Modelica. Based on the model, an optimal control problem for the start-up of the power plant has been formulated in the Optimica extension and solved using the open source software JModelica.org. The results demonstrate how high-level modeling languages and tools can be used to bridge the gap between the engineering need for intuitive description formats and the interfaces of efficient numerical algorithms.

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