Linear mass balance equilibration: a new approach for an old problem

Interval analyses are well known in the mathematics literature but have found few applications in control engineering. Based on the interval concept, we present here a methodology for data reconciliation and mass balance equilibration which is a very classical problem in mineral and chemical engineering. Indeed, this problem is solved with the view of inequality constraints which allows us to represent measurements by interval without particular knowledge and hypothesis about the density probability function of the measurement errors. As a main result, the paper gives a set of solutions for the reconciled data under an interval form and not only one solution as is the case with classical approaches.