Monitoring and control of a freeze-drying process of pharmaceutical products in vials

This PhD thesis is focused on the problem of real-time monitoring and control of the freeze-drying process applied to pharmaceutical products in vials. First, the problem of process monitoring has been addressed for both primary and secondary drying periods. This problem has been tackled under two different standpoints: the routine and preventive monitoring and the fault diagnosis. Then, the problem of process control has been addressed; in particular, various control schemes and logics have been developed and validated.