Optimal Event Point Determination for Short-Term Scheduling of Multipurpose Batch Plants via Unit-Specific Event-Based Continuous-Time Approaches

Abstract

In the past two decades, three types of continuous-time models have been developed for the short-term scheduling of multipurpose batch plants: sequence-based, slot-based, and event-based models. Both slot- and event-based models require an iterative procedure proposed by Ierapetritou and Floudas (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1998, 37, 4341) to determine the number of event points or slots, which results in increased computational time and no optimal number of event points or slots in some cases. In this work, we first enhance the recently proposed three-index unit-specific event-based model developed by Shaik and Floudas (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2009, 48, 2947) and extend it to handle different wait policies. Then, we develop a general framework to obtain the optimal number of event points where an iterative procedure is employed to obtain the maximum number of event points and determine the critical intermediate states. The approach proposed by Janak and Floudas (Comput. Chem. Eng. 2008, 32, 913) is used to obtain ...