(245a) Closed-Loop Decision Making Under Uncertainty for Sustainability Enhancement of Industrial Systems | AIChE

(245a) Closed-Loop Decision Making Under Uncertainty for Sustainability Enhancement of Industrial Systems

Authors 

Liu, Z. - Presenter, Wayne State University


Sustainability performance of manufacturing systems could be significantly improved using carefully selected design, manufacturing, and management technologies.  However, due to inherent uncertainty associated with accessible data and information relevant to technology candidates, how to identify most desirable technologies is always a challenge.  This becomes more challenging for assuring future sustainability performance of the systems as future market conditions, environmental regulations, etc., could change along the time. 

In this paper, we introduce a novel decision-making methodology for sustainability performance improvement under severe of uncertainty, where data uncertainty and scarcity leads to no data distribution information derivable.  The introduced methodology is developed by resorting to sustainability principles, control science, and process systems engineering fundamentals.  In development, we consider industrial sustainability problems as a general system control problem.  In this context, a basic closed-loop feedback control scheme is used to characterize an industrial system under investigation, evaluate and analyze its sustainability performance, and identify most suitable technologies based on the preset sustainability goals, for the improvment of the system’s sustainability under budget and other constraints.  This sustainability decision making and system performance improvement process will continue as a response to the change of external situations that may be related to market, regulation, policy, etc.  Since a large amount of information and data is uncertain, imprecise, and incomplete, an interval-parameter-based approach will be used in system characterization, assessment, and decision making.  The effectiveness of the derived decisions and system stability will also be evaluated before and after implementation.  The proposed decision making methodology has been successfully used to investigate a number of industrial problems.  In this presentation, a comprehensive study on sustainable biodiesel manufacturing in a large geographical region will be illustrated.

See more of this Session: Sustainable Manufacturing: Fundamentals and Applications

See more of this Group/Topical: Sustainable Engineering Forum