DESIGN AND SYNTHESIS OF BATCH PLANTS MINLP SOLUTION BASED ON A STOCHASTIC METHOD

Design and synthesis of batch plants must consider scheduling aspect s imultaneously. In this paper, MINLP problems arising in very general f lexible batch plants design and synthesis are solved by a stochastic M INLP optimiser. The formulations considered include linear/nonlinear m odels for capital cost processing units/storage vessels and processing task models with fixed, linear and nonlinear processing time in a gen eral form. The MINLP optimiser, based on an Evolutionary Algorithm wit h Simulated Annealing does not require convexity and smoothness of the problem formulation, and a suitable original encoding procedure is re ported. Several examples are given to demonstrate the method's efficie ncy and the quality of the solution.