The process industries are one of the UK's major sectors and include
petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, water, energy and the food industry,
amongst others. The design of a processing plant is a difficult task. This
is due to both the need to cater for multiple criteria (such as economics,
environmental and safety) and the use highly complex nonlinear models to
describe the behaviour of individual unit operations in the process. Early
in the design stages, an engineer may wish to use automated design tools to
generate conceptual plant designs which have potentially positive attributes
with respect to the main criteria. Such automated tools typically rely on
optimization for solving large mixed integer nonlinear programming models.
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This talk presents an overview of some of the work done in the Computer
Aided Process Engineering group at UCL. Primary emphasis will be given to
recent developments in hybrid optimization methods, including the use of
graphical interfaces based on problem specific visualization techniques to
allow the engineer to interact with embedded optimization procedures. Case
studies from petrochemical and water industries will be presented to
demonstrate the complexities involved and illustrate the potential benefits
of hybrid approaches.