Chemical processes are complex dynamic systems that are typically designed to accomplish a set of goals at minimum cost. To remain competitive and promote long-term sustainability, chemical plants must be designed such that they meet product specifications under stringent operational, environmental and safety restrictions in the presence of disturbances and uncertainty in the process parameters. Optimal process integration aims to find novel ways to efficiently account for multiple aspects that emerge during the operation of chemical and manufacturing systems. Tactical aspects often considered in process integration involve planning, scheduling, control, and process design decisions. Traditionally, the problems arising from these operational aspects have been addressed independently following a sequential approach. While this strategy is easy to implement, it often leads to inconsistencies across the different decision levels, such as overestimation of production capacities, constraint violations, and impractical changeovers, which translate into suboptimal or even infeasible solutions that cannot be implemented in a real setting. To date, there is no unified framework that can simultaneously integrate all these aspects since they involve multiple strategic decisions at different levels and at different time-scales, thus requiring the need for an effective systematic coordinated effort. Hence, optimal integration strategies often consider the integration of two or three aspects, e.g., integration of design and control, integration of planning and scheduling, integration of scheduling and control, integration of design, control, and scheduling decisions.
In our group, we aim to develop novel optimal process integration strategies that can lead to the grand unification of all the operational aspects that emerge in chemical and manufacturing systems. In particular, our group focuses on the development of methodologies for simultaneous design and control, integration of scheduling and control, integration of planning and scheduling and integration of planning, scheduling and control.