A mixed integer linear programming approach for the design of chemical process families

The need for rapid and widespread deployment of new technologies to address climate change goals (e.g., deep, economy-wide decarbonization) presents new opportunities for advancing modular design strategies. Conventional engineering approaches focus on unique designs for each installation, while missing opportunities for manufacturing standardization. Extending insights from the automotive industry, we optimize a platform of common unit module designs while simultaneously designing an entire family of process variants that make use of that platform. This reduces engineering effort, deployment timelines, and manufacturing costs. We propose a nonlinear generalized disjunctive programming formulation and convert this to an efficient mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation through discretization of the design space. We formulate our optimization in Pyomo with costing from IDAES, and we demonstrate the computational performance and solution quality on a water treatment desalination system from the PARETO framework and a carbon capture system built in Aspen Plus® as part of CCSI2.