OPTIMAL ADJUSTMENTS OF THE STRUCTURE OF NATIONAL CHEMICAL PRODUCTIONSTO TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC-CHANGES

The structure and the optimal technology paths of national chemical in dustries have been examined in several articles published in the last 15 years. Most of them regard the chemical production system as a netw ork of highly interrelated processes, which are to be simulated or opt imized as a whole. It is shown in this paper that the corporate charac ter of the chemical industry can lead to a suboptimal or to a non-opti mal structure as far as the overall system is concerned. Furthermore, a model based on multiobjective programming capable of dealing with co ntrasting corporate goals is proposed and an algorithm for the detecti on of optimal trade-offs is developed.