Environmental-impact reduction through simultaneous design, scheduling, and operation

Processing facilities are normally designed with sufficient flexibility to handle nominal variations. When the process features planned changes in feedstock and products, scheduling is often used to optimize process operation. Proper scheduling may be limited to existing design or may entail retrofitting. Traditionally, economic objectives have served as the primary drivers for the design, retrofitting, and scheduling of industrial processes. Once a base design and scheduling plan have been established, environmental issues are addressed in many cases as an afterthought. As a result of this sequential approach, valuable synergisms and tradeoffs of economic and environmental objectives are often missed. The objective of this study is to develop a new approach to design and scheduling with economic and environmental objectives. Specifically, this study introduces a systematic framework and the associated mathematical formulation for simultaneous process design and scheduling while simultaneously addressing economic and environmental objectives. Therefore, this study establishes two types of proper tradeoffs (a) between design and scheduling and (b) between economic and environmental objectives. The environmental issues pertaining to the parameterized process retrofitting, scheduling, and operation strategies are simultaneously considered along with the environmental impact of these changes. An optimization formulation is developed for the case of project schedule while allowing design retrofitting changes that include new environmental units and modification of design and operating conditions in the process (without new process units). Also, a process model with the appropriate level of relevant details is included in the formulation. The projected schedule is discretized to allow for a multiperiod formulation with algebraic equations. The resulting framework identifies opportunities for synergism between the economic and environmental objectives. It also determines points of diminishing return beyond which tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives are established. The devised procedure is illustrated with a case study on an oil refinery with scheduling of different products and the design of an environmental system that addresses NOx emission.