Multi-objective optimization through a novel Bayesian approach for industrial manufacturing of Polyvinyl Acetate

Abstract

ABSTRACT Manufacturing long-chain branched polymers enhances the quality of products at the cost of production time, translating into high manufacturing costs. In this manuscript, we study the cost-versus-quality trade-off while optimizing the operating conditions for large-scale industrial production of Polyvinyl acetate (PVAc). PVAc polymerization is emulated using a large system of stiff differential equations resulting in time-expensive function evaluation. Thus, we aim to achieve the Pareto optimality using Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (MOBO) that introduces q-Expected Hyper-Volume Improvement (qEHVI) as the novel acquisition function. Comparison with Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II), applied to the high-fidelity model, resulted in a similar Pareto front with only 1% of the high-fidelity calls required by NSGA-II. The results indicate the efficiency of MOBO for PVAc optimization and present a real-world application of a generic method that can be implemented to solve time-expensive multi-objective optimization in manufacturing processes