Decomposition Approaches to Batch Plant Design and Planning

Design of batch facilities through a mathematical programming approach lead to large problem size. A heuristic approach which was proposed in an earlier paper (Subrahmanyam et al. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1994b, 33, 2688) used decomposition techniques to solve an aggregate problem and a series of scheduling problems. Each of these problems corresponds to a mixed integer linear program. In this work, we derive a theoretical relationship between the aggregate problem and the detailed design formulation. A hierarchy of aggregate problems is derived, based on which an algorithm is developed to obtain optimal solutions to the overall design problem. A number of industrially derived cases are solved to illustrate and validate the algorithm.