Description

This book presents a comprehensive optimization based theory and framework that exploits the synergistic interactions and tradeoffs between process design and operational decisions that span different time scales. The authors explain how conventional methods in the process industry often isolate decision making mechanisms with a hierarchical information flow to achieve tractable problems, risking suboptimal, even infeasible operations. This book details the foundations of systematic model based strategies for simultaneous process design, scheduling, and control optimization to achieve reduced cost and improved energy consumption in process systems. The authors approach the following questions: When does the need for such an integration of scales arise? Which types of industrially relevant problems and applications can be considered for such an approach? Where do we stand regarding methodological developments and solution strategies as enablers and tools for such an integration? If desired, what would be the ideal framework and potentially the target software platform for achieving such a unification? This Second Edition includes developments in methodological approaches and software platform unification, as well as discussion on the need for integration.