Environmental optimisation of releases from industrial sites into a linear receiving body

Abstract Changes to environmental legislation are setting new challenges to both operators and regulators. Optimisation tools can help to turn subjective standards such as Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) (HMIP, 1994: Sharratt, 1995) into more objective ones. Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming (MINLP) is used in this work to optimise overall environmental performance for a group of plants. These plants discharge their final effluents to the same receiving body — a river. The optimisation considers not only the possible configurations within each plant but also the behaviour of the receiving body. A two-stage optimisation is used. Examples illustrate the features of the model.