Design of multipurpose production facilities:: A RTN decomposition-based algorithm

A general mathematical formulation for the design of multipurpose facilities has recently been presented by Barbosa-Povoa and Pantelides (1997). The model proposed permits a detailed consideration of the design problem taking account of trade-offs between capital costs, revenues and operational flexibility. The optimal solution involves the selection of the required processing and storage equipment items and the required levels of provision of other production resources such as utilities, manpower, cleaning and transportation equipment. In order to guarantee solution optimality, the above design formulation has to consider a large number of equipment items, out of which it will select the ones that will actually be incorporated in the plant. This may result in large mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems that are expensive to solve. This paper presents a decomposition approach for the solution of large batch process design problems. The approach involves the iterative solution of a master problem (representing a relaxation of the original design problem) and a design sub-problem tin which several of the design decisions are already fixed). An example illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed decomposition approach is presented.