RELATION BETWEEN MILP MODELING AND LOGICAL INFERENCE FOR CHEMICAL PROCESS SYNTHESIS

The objective of this paper is to show that qualitative knowledge in process synthesis that can be expressed in propositional logic form has an equivalent representation as linear equations and inequalities. Recent contributions in operations research are reviewed for this purpose including inference problems that can be formulated as MILP problems that can be solved mostly as relaxed LPs. It will also be shown how some of these ideas can be applied to chemical process synthesis. Also, comparisons with production systems are presented, as well as the application of the propositional logic-based approach to the systematic modelling of integer constraints that commonly arise in synthesis problems. Several examples are presented to illustrate the ideas.