A micro module approach to the design and control of autonomous decentralized chemical plant

Abstract In systems management today, a flat organizational structure can be flexibly adapted to environmental changes owing to autonomous behaviour of individuals, and such design concepts serve to eliminate a hierarchical structure from an organization. Learning from such situations and applying the basic concept behind to them engineering problem-solving is expected. Using the concept may realize the design and operation of flexible plants in which systems structures are not fixed and each unit has a wider operating range. Furthermore, the control structures are different from those of the traditional scheme of hierarchy. One of the promising ways of accomplishing this is based on the “autonomous decentralized systems concept”, which is not well established and the definition of which terminology is not concrete. In this paper, the authors present a new framework of processing systems design and operations on the basis of the autonomous decentralized system concept.