NAMUR Award 2015

Every year NAMUR presents awards for outstanding scientific theses (diploma/Master’s and doctoral degree) in the field of intelligent process control.

At the 2015 Annual General Meeting of NAMUR two excellent doctoral theses were recognized with a NAMUR Award:

Dr. Lars Christiansen received the NAMUR Award for his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Knowledge- based Diagnostic Concept Through a Combination of Plant Structure and Process Models’.

The thesis was written at the Helmut Schmidt Universität in Hamburg and supervised by Professor Fay.

Lars Christiansen’s doctoral thesis addresses the model-based diagnosis of complex production plants.

This scientifically substantial thesis shows convincingly that a process diagnosis based on automatically derivable plant structure information and on process knowledge is feasible and offers benefits.

While working on his thesis Lars Christiansen successfully demonstrated the solution he had developed in an application relevant to NAMUR.

Dr. David Müller received the NAMUR Award for his doctoral thesis on the ‘Development of Operation Trajectories Under Uncertainty for a Hydroformylation Miniplant’.

The thesis was written at Berlin Technical University and supervised by Professor Wozny.

In his thesis David Müller calculates optimal trajectories under uncertainty for a mini plant. Specific parameters in the model are uncertain. David Müller applies a stochastic optimisation method where constraints with probabilities are given, such as the probability that product quality will be higher than a given value in spite of prevailing uncertainties.

David Müller uses an example to demonstrate that this stochastic optimisation method yields better results than deterministic optimisation.