Logistic Optimization of Chemical Production Processes

In the demand-driven operation of chemical, biochemical and pharmaceutical production plants, the efficient use of the available resources is of crucial importance to the economic performance of today's chemical companies. As the first of its kind, this book addresses the logistic optimization of chemical production processes, both from a practical and an academic point of view. All the chapters discuss real-world applications or case studies derived from authentic industrial problems. This book reviews the main problems in supply-chain optimization, the description of the methods and tools currently used in industry, logistic simulation, campaign planning under uncertainty, up to heuristics-and optimization-based production planning and scheduling, and recently proposed advanced optimization algorithms and their integration in ERP systems.

Throughout, the authors represent industrial users of tools for logistic optimization, developers and vendors of such tools and software systems as well as academic researchers. the result is an up-to-date survey of the field, which can equally be used as a textbook in courses on the operation of chemical plants.

Sebastian Engell received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, in 1978, and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the Universität Duisburg, Germany in 1981. In 1987 the Universität Duisburg granted him the venia legendi in Automatic Control

Since 1990 he has been Professor of Process Control in the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering, Universität Dortmund, Germany. 1996-1999 he served as the Department Chairman, and from 2002-2005 as Vice-Rector for Research, Promotion of Young Scientists and International Relations of Universität Dortmund. Since 2005, he is a member of the selection committee for the Leibniz-Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

In 2006 Sebastian Engell was appointed Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control.

His areas of research are control design, modeling and control of chemical and biochemical processes, hybrid systems, logic control and scheduling in the process industries.