Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Advanced Process Control

Operational efficiency is an important driver for success in minerals processing. A broad range of techniques can be used for production optimization. Likewise, there are a broad range of production challenges to be addressed, each with their individual characteristics. A data-driven approach has shown great benefit in manufacturing industries in identifying new improvement opportunities.

While Advanced Process Control (APC) remains the dominant technique for optimizing continuous processes, new data-driven empirical methods, popularly described as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML), expand the toolset we have. An open question though is how best to use these techniques. Let’s look at some ways that AI/ML can be used in the process industries, and how that impacts the traditional APC space.