An Extended Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Integrated Process and Control System Design

• Published in: Industrial & engineering chemistry research Vol. 48; no. 14; pp. 6723 - 6738
• Main Authors: Schlüter, Martin, Egea, Jose A, Antelo, Luis T, Alonso, Antonio A, Banga, Julio R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Chemical Society 15.07.2009
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Chemical engineering; Exact sciences and technology; Process Design and Control; System design; Algorithm; Control system; Optimization
• ISSN: 0888-5885; 1520-5045
• DOI: 10.1021/ie8016785

The problem of integrated process and control system design is discussed in this paper. We formulate it as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem subject to differential-algebraic constraints. This class of problems is frequently nonconvex and, therefore, local optimization techniques usually fail to locate the global solution. Here we propose a global optimization algorithm, based on an extension of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic, in order to solve this challenging class of problems in an efficient and robust way. The ideas of the methodology are explained and, on the basis of different full-plant case studies, the performance of the approach is evaluated. The first set of benchmark problems deal with the integrated design and control of two different wastewater treatment plants, consisting on both NLP and MINLP formulations. The last case study is the well-known Tennessee Eastman process. Numerical experiments with our new method indicate that we can achieve an improved performance in all cases. Additionally, our method outperforms several other recent competitive solvers for the challenging case studies considered.