A simultaneous-modular approach to process flowsheeting and optimization. Part II: Performance on simulation problems

The performance of the simultaneous‐modular approach on five simulation problems, ranging in complexity from very simple to moderately complex, is studied. Numerical experiments comparing different computational strategies for implementing the simultaneous‐modular approach are also performed. Full‐block perturbation is found to be the most suitable technique for obtaining the flowsheet‐level Jacobian. On process simulation problems the simultaneous‐modular approach, as implemented in SIMMOD, is found to be as reliable as the sequential‐modular approach, and competitive with or sometimes much better than the sequential‐modular approach in terms of computational efficiency.