GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION OF THE BIFUNCTIONAL CATALYST PROBLEM

As shown by Luus et al. (1992), determination of the optimum catalyst blend along a tubular reactor to maximize the yield of a particular co mponent is a difficult problem due to the large number of local optima . By using iterative dynamic programming, the effects of the region re duction factor and the choice of the initial region size are analyzed in detail for this problem. Even if a single grid-point for the state is used, the likelihood of obtaining the global optimum is very high i f the initial region size is chosen to be sufficiently large.