A simultaneous‐modular approach to process flowsheeting and optimization. Part I: Theory and implementation

There basic problem formulations for the simultaneous-modular approach are discussed, as are three alternative methods for computing the flowsheet-level Jacobian. A new algorithm for partitioning and tearing when using the simultaneous-modular approach is also presented. SIMMOD, our implementation of the simultaneous-modular approach is then outlined. In subsequent papers in this series we use SIMMOD to study the performance of the simultaneous-modular approach on process simulation and optimization problems, as well as to perform experiments on different numerical strategies for implementing the simultaneous-modular approach.