DEGREES OF FREEDOM ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC DYNAMIC OPTIMAL PLANTWIDE OPERATION

Improving the operation is an attractive option for the process industry to deal with increased competition. In this paper a general dynamic optimization framework is proposed that aims to improve plantwide operation in an economic sense. The term general means that it is based on dynamic operation in which any operational constraints can be accommodated. One would expect economic optimization to utilize all available degrees of freedom. However it is shown that this is normally not the case, so this leaves the possibility open to do further optimization.