Hans-Uhde price awarded to Hilde Gerold from PAS

Hilde Gerold was awarded the Hans Uhde Prize on May 6, 2026, in recognition of her outstanding academic achievements.  As in previous years, the award ceremony took place at Uhde.

In her master’s thesis, “Enhancing Control in Chemical Processes using Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback,” written at the Chair of Process Automation Systems, she investigates the integration of human process knowledge into data-driven control strategies. The focus is on the approach of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which is used to incorporate the preferences of process experts to develop safe and efficient controllers for complex chemical processes. The work is motivated by the increasing complexity of modern chemical processes, which often exhibit strong nonlinearities, interacting variables, and strict operational constraints that make their control particularly challenging.

The developed methodology was applied, among other cases, to a bio-batch reactor for penicillin production and to a polymerization reactor. In addition to purely data-driven learning approaches, the study also explores how reinforcement learning methods can be combined with established model-based control concepts in order to incorporate process knowledge and constraints more effectively. In the RLHF framework, human feedback is collected by comparing simulated process trajectories. These preferences are then used to train a neural-network-based reward model, which guides the reinforcement learning process. The results show that safety-critical factors and long-term effects can be successfully incorporated through human feedback. Overall, the study demonstrates that RLHF can help bridge the gap between data-driven and model-based control, highlighting its potential as a framework for future intelligent process automation systems that combine learning from data with domain expertise.