A novel approach to the simultaneous design & control problem

The importance of the simultaneous consideration of process design and control at the early design stages has been identified in the past and a lot of effort has been expended towards the development of systematic and practically applicable methodologies to address it. The complex nature of chemical processes combined with the stochastic nature of uncertainty are the main reason for the slow development in this field. This paper introduces a novel methodology for the simultaneous solution of the design and control problems. Use is made of the back-off methodology, which has been developed through almost three decades, in order to avoid solving complex dynamic optimization problems. The method is based on the solution of a static optimization problem where the information related to process dynamics is captured in the necessary back-off from the constraints to ensure feasibility. The efficiency of the proposed formulation is demonstrated in several case studies.