Process Control: The Passive Systems Approach (Bao & Lee, 2007)

Engineering monograph in the Advances in Industrial Control series (Springer). Jie Bao (UNSW) and Peter L. Lee (University of South Australia). 7 chapters plus references; focused on passivity-based control for industrial processes.

Why it is (only marginally) relevant here

This book is a terminological false friend. The word "process" in its title refers to physical/chemical processes — heat exchangers, continuous stirred-tank reactors, distillation columns, boiler furnaces — not to business processes. The "control" refers to feedback control theory (stabilisation of dynamical systems), not to BPM process control, compliance, or conformance.

It appears in raw/Process Frameworks & BPM/ because a filename-based literature collection swept it in alongside genuine BPM books. Keeping a short source page is worthwhile for three reasons:

Lint hygiene — so future searches on "process control" land on this disambiguation instead of silently conflating three traditions.
Terminological disambiguation — the word "process control" in BPM / OM / chemical engineering denotes three distinct things:
- Chemical-engineering process control (this book): feedback stabilisation of plant dynamics via passivity / H∞ / model-predictive control.
- Statistical Process Control (SPC, OM tradition — see sources/2007-slack-operations-management Ch. 17): control charts, process capability, acceptance sampling, upper/lower control limits on a measured variable.
- BPM process control / conformance (concepts/conformance-checking; sources/2011-vanderaalst-process-mining-book Ch. 8): detecting deviations of event-log behaviour from a prescribed process model.
Possible far-future bridge — concepts like controllability (Ch. 6) and fault tolerance (Ch. 5) have analogues in self-adaptive / agentic BPM (e.g., concepts/mape-k-loop is partly descended from control theory). Any serious agentic-BPM-meets-control-theory work would need to consult this tradition, but the current wiki does not require it.

Ingest strategy

Minimal-sufficient. No deep-dive planned. Flagged out-of-scope in tags.

Book structure

Ch	Title	Content
1	Introduction	Motivation for passive-systems approach
2	Dissipativity and Passivity	Foundations: passive systems, KYP property, phase, interconnection, passivity indices, passivation, passivity theorem
3	Passivity-based Robust Control	Uncertainty characterisation; robust stability + nominal performance; combining with small-gain; CSTR and mixing examples
4	Passivity-based Decentralised Control	Decentralised integral controllability; BDIC; dynamic interaction measure; boiler furnace case
5	Passivity-based Fault-tolerant Control	Sensor/actuator fault representation; DUS condition; PI control; stable + unstable processes
6	Process Controllability Analysis Based on Passivity	Extended internal model control; regions of attainability; high-purity distillation column case
7	Process Control Based on Physically Inherent Passivity	(Guest chapter by Hangos & Szederkényi) thermodynamics, Hamiltonian systems, physical-passivity foundations

Connections

Primarily negative connections — this is what to not conflate with when a BPM source says "process control":

Not related to concepts/conformance-checking (BPM sense).
Not related to SPC in sources/2007-slack-operations-management.
Not related to operational support / concepts/operational-support in sources/2011-vanderaalst-process-mining-book.

Weak positive connection: MAPE-K (concepts/mape-k-loop) and self-adaptive control loops share ancestry with feedback-control theory as represented here, but the engineering-control literature is a parallel universe to the MAPE-K / IBM Autonomic Computing line typically cited in BPM.

Open questions

If any future wiki page needs to draw the three-way distinction between chemical-process control, statistical process control, and BPM conformance, this page should be the landing point.