The first joint conference on the Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations (FOCAPO) and Chemical Process Control (CPC) will be held in Savannah, Georgia during the second week of January, 2012. The conferences will be held sequentially, with FOCAPO beginning on Sunday evening and ending on Wednesday evening. CPC begins on Tuesday evening and ends on Friday evening. Joint, single-track sessions will be held on Tuesday evening, and Wednesday, with a joint conference dinner on Wednesday evening. Financial support is to cover the registration expenses for 15 young faculty members and 30 graduate students to participate in both conferences.
Intellectual Merit
FOCAPO and CPC have individually been the premier conferences in their respective areas of computer-aided process operations and chemical process control. Recognizing that, particularly from an industrial manufacturing perspective, these areas have a tremendous overlap, a goal of this proposed joint conference is to increase the participation in each individual conference. Ideally, there will be a substantial number of participants that will register for both conferences, sparking interesting interactions and collaborations.
Broader Impacts
The funds will be used to support 15 young faculty members, and 30 graduate students, who will be encouraged to participate in both conferences. Most of the graduate students attending will be involved as co-authors in the contributed papers session. The organizers will also encourage participation by women and minority graduate students, and will contact U.S. faculty who are active in the area of process operations and control and encourage them to have their more advanced students attend this conference.
The first joint conference on the Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations (FOCAPO) and Chemical Process Control (CPC) was held in Savannah, Georgia during the second week of January, 2012. FOCAPO and CPC have individually been the premier conferences in their respective areas of computer-aided process operations and chemical process control. Recognizing that, particularly from an industrial manufacturing perspective, these areas have a tremendous overlap, a goal of this proposed joint conference was to increase participation in each individual conference. Thus, the motivation for a joint conference was two-fold: (i) technical overlap that may spark interesting interactions and collaborations, and (ii) increased registrations for less financial risk compared to two individual conferences. Both goals appear to have been met, and the post-conference survey was overwhelmingly supportive of the joint conference format. The 182 participants were a mix of academics and industrial practitioners, with 96 from academia (53%), 48 from industry (26%), and 38 students (21%). Four major themes were developed for the conferences: (i) integration of control, optimization, planning and scheduling in a scalable way (ii) process monitoring and fault detection, (iii) forecasting, and (iv) nontraditional applications of optimization to business problems. The conference achieved its goal of bringing the community together to define a productive path forward for process systems research and development. This was evident from the broad academic and industrial participation, and the numerous constructive discussions that took place at the conference. The merit of co-joining the FOCAPO and CPC topics and communities was strongly affirmed by the a priori comments of the industry panelists and the post-conference feedback from the attendees. It was also evident that the state of the field is strong and its future agenda is exciting. Chemical engineering continues to command a central role in modern scientific and engineering developments, particularly through its growth in the energy, materials and health sectors. Systems and process control are critical for translating fundamental advances in the above areas to concrete engineering solutions. At the same time, as process and plant complexity, and global competition increase, process control solutions continue to be a major enabler of gains in operational efficiency in the chemical and petrochemical industry.
