Challenges in sustainable integrated process synthesis and the capabilities of an MINLP process synthesizer MipSyn

In order to fundamentally renovate chemical and process industries based on firm sustainability principles, the scope of process synthesis should be expanded to the whole chemical supply-chain. Consequently, the capabilities of our methods and tools should be upgraded to enable the identification of new compounds, new reaction paths, and processes in order to create new products with desired properties and functionalities. The task, however, is extremely challenging since we are dealing with multi-criteria and enormous amount of complex interactions, uncertainties, discrete and continuous decisions, giving rise to the use of the simultaneous, mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) approach. The use of the mathematical programming with its valuable creative principles, i.e. optimality, feasibility and integrality of solutions, should thus become an essential synthesizing technology for obtaining " truly " integrated sustainable solutions. Although several efficient MINLP solvers have been developed in the last two decades, hardly any academic or professional MINLP synthesizer has been developed so far for solving such nontrivial problems even at the level of process synthesis. The present contribution wishes to shed light on some important challenges and capabilities of the Mixed-Integer Process Synthesizer (MipSyn), the successor of the process synthesizer PROSYN-MINLP (Kravanja and Grossmann, 1990-1994).