Operation Planning Under Product Demand Uncertainty In Complex Chemical Plants

ERICA P. SCHULZ; M. SOLEDAD DIAZ

Chemical Engineering Transactions Vol 12

AIDIC

Lugar: Milan; Año: 2007; p. 383 - 388

The present work deals with the operational planning and process optimization under uncertainty for ethylene plants through the formulation of a two-stage stochastic model which is transformed into a deterministic mixed integer nonlinear (MINLP) one. The model includes mass balances and nonlinear correlations for the furnaces and the entire plant. The decay in furnaces performance throughout operating time has been modelled by means of two sets of binary variables and several continuous time varying variables (Schulz et al., 2006). First stage decisions are associated to manufacturing variables, while second stage decisions are related to logistics. The model comprises more than 10000 constraints and 256 binary variables. The resulting MINLP problem has been solved in GAMS (Brooke et al., 1992) using DICOPT++ (Viswanathan and Grossmann, 1990).