Multicriteria Optimization of Chemical Processes under Uncertainty

Abstract

A chemical process often cannot be evaluated using a single criterion; rather, several criteria should be applied, which may conflict with one another. For example, an economic criterion of a process may conflict with the environmental impact of the process and also with a control system operation criterion [1]. This requires one to supplement chemical process optimization with ideas and methods of multicriteria optimization theory [2, 3]. In the deterministic case, these ideas and methods can be used directly. However, when optimization of a chemical process should take into account the uncertainty of source information, numerous results obtained using a single criterion [4‐10] cannot be extended to a multicriteria case. To date, multicriteria optimization under uncertainty has been considered only in a few works devoted to particular problems. For example, in one of them [11], multicriteria optimization was used to simultaneously take into account an economic criterion and a control system operation criterion. This is clearly insufficient. It is necessary to systematically study the problem of multicriteria optimization under uncertainty in order to obtain new results for both refining the formulation of the problem and developing the methods for solving it. This paper deals with the first task.