A COMBINED MILP AND LOGIC-BASED APPROACH TO THE SYNTHESIS OF OPERATING PROCEDURES FOR BATCH PLANTS

Abstract

Abstract Synthesizing a set of operating procedures for the safe and efficient transient operation of chemical plants is a difficult problem owing to the enormous number of possible combinations of actions in a typical plant. In most current industrial plant design practice, there are no formal methods for systematically transforming process specifications into operating procedures for the plant operators and into sequence control instructions for the control computers. There is much scope for a formalized computer-based procedure synthesis methodology to assist the design engineer/plant operator with both the formulation and assessment of procedures off-line and, eventually, with the on-line problem of procedure synthesis in response to unexpected situations A recently developed approach for operating procedure synthesis for multipurpose batch plants is considered. The modelling formalism used includes the separate definition of process operations, as State Task Networks, and of physical plant, at the le...