Towards Self Driving Processes: Leveraging the Data Revolution

人们普遍认为，我们正处于第四次工业革命的黎明，这将带来一个前所未有的自动化过程工业水平。这种乐观情绪受到无处不在的网络物理系统的偶然融合，易于访问大量数据，不断扩展的计算能力和数据分析的重大理论突破的刺激。我们集团的长期愿景是创建类似于自动驾驶汽车的自动驾驶流程。一个真正的自动驾驶过程将通过生成必要的过程输入，通过学习其动态，通过自动调整其控制器以及通过检测，隔离和预测各种故障，在最小甚至没有人为干扰的情况下运行。 该提案旨在开发一套算法和计算工具，将自动化的愿景带到流程工业中。

It is widely believed that we are at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution that will bring a level of automation process industry has never seen before. This optimism is spurred by the rather serendipitous confluence of ubiquitous cyber-physical systems, easy access to large volumes of data, expanding computing power and major theoretical breakthroughs in data analytics. Our group's long term vision is to create self-driving processes similar to self driving cars. A truly self-driving autonomous process will operate with minimal to no human interference by generating necessary process inputs, by learning its dynamics, by automatically tuning its controller, and by detecting, isolating and predicting various faults. This proposal seeks to develop a set of algorithms and computational tools to bring this vision of automation to the process industry.