A combined simulation/optimization approach to process plant design

It is now critically important to understand all aspects of process plant design, because of market pressures to deliver high-quality, specialized products at lower cost, and with faster response to customer requests. Key design elements which are often overlooked include the operations and scheduling consequence of the design. In this paper, we present an approach to incorporating the key operational elements into the design of a process plant. The elements of the approach are described, along with an example application of the techniques.