ABB’s award winning Expert Optimizer is now optimizing over 200 kilns

Baden, Switzerland, April 1, 2009 – ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, announced today that the installation of their Expert Optimizer solution at St Lawrence Cement’s Joliette plant in Canada brings the number of kilns benefiting from Expert Optimizer to over 200. At Joliette, which is part of the Holcim Group, Expert Optimizer has been installed on three kilns, meaning the plant has the 200^th, 201^st and 202^nd installations. Expert Optimizer is also installed on more than 200 mills and is optimizing processes in over 42 different countries.

Expert Optimizer started its life as LINKman and the first LINKman installations took place in 1986. During 22 years of continuous development and improvement, Expert Optimizer’s performance in cement plants has proved to be highly satisfactory as is revealed by its strong reference record. Typical production increases for a kiln being optimized by Expert Optimizer are in the order of 2 – 5%. A recent Expert Optimizer project in Italy saw a production increase of 8%. As well as being installed on over 200 kilns, it is also optimizing as many mills, and last year won the Global Fuels Award for ‘Most innovative technology for electrical energy efficiency’.

Expert Optimizer is advanced process control software, the purpose of which is to achieve continuous process optimization. Part of ABB’s cpmPlus suite of solutions, it coordinates the setpoints of the different parts of the process and immediately detects deviations among the different parts of the operation. By expertly applying rule based control with modern tools like neural networks, fuzzy control, Model Predictive Control (MPC), Mixed Logical Dynamic (MLD) frameworks and now also model based state estimation in the moving horizon approach, Expert Optimizer is able to stabilize and then optimize the process. These techniques, combined with the knowledge of ABB’s process experts during commissioning, help plant management to reach profitability and sustainability goals.

ABB's suite of Collaborative Production Management solutions (www.abb.com/cpm and www.abb.com/cement ) which includes Expert Optimizer and Knowledge Manager provide productivity improvements to process automation companies.

ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs more than 120,000 people.