Abstract

Many industrial processes involve heating and cooling liquids: a quarter of the EU 2012 energy consumption came from industry and industry uses 73% of this energy on heating and cooling. We discuss mixed-integer nonlinear optimisation and its applications to energy efficiency. Our particular emphasis is on algorithms and solution techniques enabling optimisation for large-scale industrial networks.

As a first application, optimising heat exchangers networks may increase efficiency in industrial plants. We develop deterministic global optimisation algorithms for a mixed-integer nonlinear optimisation model that simultaneously incorporates utility cost, equipment area, and hot/cold stream matches. We automatically recognise and exploit special mathematical structures common in heat recovery. We also computationally demonstrate the impact on the global optimisation solver ANTIGONE and benchmark large-scale test cases against heuristic approaches.

As a second application, we discuss special structure in nonconvex quadratically-constrained optimisation problems, particularly through the lens of stream mixing and intermediate blending on process systems engineering networks. We take a parametric approach to uncovering topological structure and sparsity of the standard pooling problem in its p-formulation. We show that the sparse patterns of active topological structure are associated with a piecewise objective function. Finally, the presentation explains the conditions under which sparsity vanishes and where the combinatorial complexity emerges to cross over the P/NP boundary. We formally present the results obtained and their derivations for various specialised instances.

@InProceedings{balteanlugojan_et_al:LIPIcs:2017:7628,
  author =	{Radu Baltean-Lugojan and Christodoulos A. Floudas and Ruth Misener and Miten Mistry},
  title =	{{Designing Energy-Efficient Heat Recovery Networks using Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimisation}},
  booktitle =	{16th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2017)},
  pages =	{1:1--1:1},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-036-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2017},
  volume =	{75},
  editor =	{Costas S. Iliopoulos and Solon P. Pissis and Simon J. Puglisi and Rajeev Raman},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7628},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-76288},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2017.1},
  annote =	{Keywords: Heat exchanger network, Mixed-integer nonlinear optimisation, Log mean temperature difference, Deterministic global optimisation}
}