The manufacturing environment today is changing with intense competition, tighter requirements on product quality and stringent guidelines on environmental compliance. The need to have Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) in place will soon become mandatory especially in the drug and pharmaceutical sector. However, a majority of the current day batch process plants are not fully geared to adapt to GMP norms that are being laid down. Batch process industry constitutes a significant segment of the Indian chemical industry and is engaged in the manufacture of a wide range of chemicals, pharmaceuticals and consumer products. Batch plants with their inherent flexible structure provide several challenges and opportunities for the manufacturer. They could be used in a multi-purpose manner to produce a slew of products based on the market demand and economics. There are many difficulties in implementation of GMP in the batch process industries. Batch processes are often poorly instrumented. Often there is a lack of quantitative knowledge of the process characteristics. Even in cases where there is adequate instrumentation, there has been no concerted effort to use the available batch process data to gain a better understanding of the process behavior so as to operate the processes better. The problem is further compounded by the fact that on-line measurement of quality is difficult and one has to rely on periodic off-line measurement of product quality. It is in this context that one has to view the prospects of low cost automation as a means to address the problems encountered in the batch process plants. Low cost automation needs to be viewed as judicious blend of hardware and software, scaled and configured to address various operational and control functionalities outlined below.

Batch Process Monitoring. Low cost data acquisition systems can be used to monitor some of the key process variables like temperature, pressure, pH, conductivity etc. Batch to batch data of these variables can provide the basis for developing correlations

Batch Process Control. The nonlinear and dynamic nature of batch process operation makes the batch process control problem rather complex. Batch process data can be used to develop Tendency Models for depicting the chemical transformations and generate Calorimetric Models for depicting the thermal effects. With the ability to track process runaway, one can plan for more aggressive policies for batch reactor control with faster reaction completion and better control of conversion. Batch distillation is another operation used widely in the process industry. Through modeling one can develop optimal operational policies permitting higher recovery of costly products, as well as recycle policies which minimize reprocessing cost. Studies conducted at IIT Bombay have shown immense potential for application of these strategies in batch, semi-batch(fed-batch) reactor control and batch distillation operations.

Batch Process Management. With tighter control of batch operations at the plant level, it is possible to pay attention to higher manufacturing goals, such as higher productivity, better capacity utilization, energy conservation and flexible manufacturing. Batch process planning through formal optimization tools help in evolving production plans to meet set operational goals. The use of appropriate scheduling strategies helps in ensuring delivery of desired products as per the deadlines and reduction of in-plant inventory. Work is in progress at IIT Bombay on the development of planning and scheduling strategies for batch and semi-continuous processes.