Rethinking Process Control Education: The Southampton Approach

Mohamed G Hassan, Syed Zaheer Abbas and Nuno Bimbo on embedding process control as a core, industry-facing discipline from the first year at the University of Southampton

WHEN the University of Southampton launched its chemical engineering programme from a blank sheet, it created an opportunity to rethink how engineers are formed: interdisciplinary, industry-facing and sustainability-first. Process control became our test case.Traditionally taught as abstract maths such as Laplace transforms and transfer functions, control often lacks context and leaves graduates underprepared. Yet in industry, it underpins safety, quality, emissions, efficiency and profitability and is increasingly central to decarbonisation and digitalisation.

We asked a simple question: why does such a foundational discipline often feel marginal in education? Our response has been to modernise and integrate control teaching with practical industry collaboration, aligning technical rigour with real-world relevance.

Embedding control from day one

Instead of isolating control as a late, maths-heavy topic, we integrate foundational control and instrumentation from Year One. Students encounter variability and stability in fluid-flow exercises and explore feedback within core modules.

By Year Two, a dedicated control module builds on that foundation. Students already understand why control matters. They see temperature and pressure control shaping reactor conversion, loops stabilising distillation under fluctuating feeds and the management of dynamic responses in heat exchangers. This staged progression fosters conceptual maturity and curiosity, not mere compliance.

Mathematics remains rigorous and is delivered through applied maths modules. The difference is contextualisation. Students work with model-scale pilot plants, digital-twin simulations and professional software such as Aspen and MATLAB/Python to design and test strategies. A TSC virtual control room and simulation packages¹ provide authentic, risk-free operational experience. Together, these elements bridge theory and practice, encouraging students to ask not only what is happening but why it matters, what could fail and what could improve system performance.

The control room: learning under real constraints

At Southampton, process control is taught as it is practised: in control rooms, on the plant floor and under real constraints.

Central to this approach is a simulated control room that mirrors modern industrial distributed control systems (DCS), including dashboards, alarms, trends and interface logic. Students manage dynamic processes in real time, interpret conflicting signals, collaborate under stress and communicate clearly with operators and supervisors. They experience startups, shutdowns, disturbances and optimisation challenges while balancing safety, cost, efficiency and emissions. This reframes control from mathematical exercise to contextualised decision-making. Students learn not just how to calculate, but when to intervene, how to prioritise and how to justify actions. Technical competence becomes professional judgement. Just as importantly, they begin to understand the human dimension of control. Working in teams, they see how decisions affect operators, environmental performance and organisational goals. Control becomes a core element of professional engineering practice.

Tangible systems and systems thinking

We have invested in model-scale rigs – distillation columns, reactors, heat exchangers and water-treatment units – equipped with instrumentation, real-time sensors and programmable logic controller (PLC)-based control. These platforms serve as both teaching tools and research infrastructure for undergraduate and MSc projects, allowing students to experiment, fail safely, iterate and optimise like practising engineers.

A second-year exercise might involve proportional-integral-derivative (PID) tuning on a heat exchanger, while a final-year project could simulate dynamic control of a bioreactor in MATLAB or Aspen Dynamics and validate insights on a physical rig.

We reposition control as a systems-level discipline: understanding how processes behave, respond and evolve. From day one, students adopt a systems-thinking mindset, seeking patterns, feedback loops and unintended consequences.

In design and sustainability modules, control is framed as a core design decision within the process architecture. Students explore safer startups, faster transitions between operating states and smoother load-following in integrated energy systems. They ask what makes a process inherently more stable, how advanced control can reduce waste and where variability originates and can be contained, seeing control as a route to adaptability, resilience and multi-objective optimisation.

The practical impacts are substantial. Tighter loops reduce fluctuations and run plants closer to optimum conditions, improving energy efficiency while reducing emissions, downtime and off-spec product. Framed within environmental, social and governance objectives, control emerges as a strategic lever rather than a background function.

Industry engagement reinforces this perspective through guest lectures, site visits and advisory input, with a forthcoming short course extending learning beyond the undergraduate programme.

Why isn't control more widely adopted

Advanced process control remains underused in many plants. The barriers are rarely technical.

Management buy-in can be weak, with control viewed as a backroom activity rather than an investment driver. Yet modest improvements in tuning and setpoint strategy can reduce energy, materials, emissions and downtime. The challenge is translation: expressing technical gains in business terms.

A skills gap also persists. Engineers and operators often lack the training or confidence to exploit DCS/PLC features such as feedforward, model-based control or fault detection, so powerful capabilities are under-utilised. Practical, hands-on education that emphasises interpretation, troubleshooting and optimisation helps close this gap.

Complexity and change aversion compound the issue. Legacy systems, limited documentation and a “good enough” mindset make modifications appear risky. Incremental, low-risk improvements – re-tuning PID loops, rationalising alarms, adding cascade or feedforward elements and improving instrumentation – often deliver significant returns without major disruption.

Education therefore must extend beyond theory to advocacy: identifying quick wins, quantifying value and communicating proposals across organisational boundaries.

Hybrid control and intelligent systems

The future of process control is increasingly data driven. Classical methods remain essential but AI, machine learning and digital twins now enable real-time optimisation, anomaly detection and predictive maintenance.

At Southampton, students experiment with reinforcement learning for controller tuning, develop digital twins for scenario testing and explore machine-learning tools for detecting process drift and forecasting failures. An interdisciplinary pathway links chemical engineering with data science, while early exposure to Python and MATLAB builds computational fluency. The guiding philosophy is hybrid. Intelligent systems augment human expertise rather than replace it. Graduates learn to combine first-principles understanding with data-driven tools and to judge when automation enhances resilience and performance.

Repositioning control

Process control underpins safety, sustainability, resilience and profitability. If industry expects graduates to manage decarbonisation, digitalisation and operational uncertainty, control cannot remain an abstract mathematical exercise. It must be taught as an operational discipline grounded in context, judgement and measurable outcomes. Embedding rigorous theory within realistic constraints strengthens not only graduate capability but the industry’s capacity to innovate responsibly.

Early outcomes are encouraging. Graduates demonstrate holistic thinking, decisive action and clear communication in multidisciplinary settings. The wider opportunity is clear: by rethinking how control is taught, we strengthen the foundations of modern chemical engineering itself.

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Mohamed G Hassan is director of programmes in chemical and sustainable engineering at University of Southampton where Nuno Bimbo is an associate professor and Syed Zaheer Abbas is a lecturer

Reference

1. www.tscsimulation.com/