COCOP: Overview

The final goal of COCOP was to increase the competitiveness of the European process and automation industry by increasing product quality, improving sustainability, reducing operation costs and improving working conditions.

The approach was to consider operating conditions of all unit processes of an entire plant and the mutual interactions of the unit processes to optimise and improve the overall plant-wide operation, integrating technological and social innovation within a common co-creation process. Development of data based and mathematical process models and application of plant-wide optimisation are the key elements of the project.  A straightforward optimisation formulation of plant-wide operations creates such a huge mathematical optimisation problem that it is difficult to solve it with existing optimisation algorithms. An alternative approach, benefited in COCOP, is to decompose the entire optimisation problem into sub-problems and then, coordinating the solutions of sub-problems to achieve a plant-wide optimal operation.

The COCOP solution developed in the project consists of a novel ICT architecture, methods and instructions ("cookbook") for developing models for the two pilot cases (copper and steel manufacturing process), pilot cases related models and the corresponding optimisation methods, and implementations for test cases. Additionally, the integration of technological development within a social innovation process led to new methodological insights and tools.

The new predictive models and optimisation algorithms provide relevant information of the process. Using this information, the operator and other personnel can improve the overall understanding of the constraints of the process and bottlenecks of the operation, which affects to process operation and efficiency. The COCOP concept and system architecture facilitates integration of distributed processes and provides the required scalability and standardised interfaces for integration of information and control systems used in the industry.