Supporting the transfer of products between different equipment through latent variable model inversion

Product transfer is a problem commonly encountered in industry when a production has to be transferred from a source plant to a target plant. In this paper a strategy to assist product transfer is proposed. The strategy is based on latent variable models (LVMs) to relate the data available from one or more source plants with the (usually scarce) data available from the target plant, and on LVM inversion to estimate the target plant operating conditions. The inversion is performed within an optimization framework, which can handle constraints for both product quality variables and input variables. An experimental nanoparticle production process is used as a test bed to illustrate the benefits of the proposed strategy.