Simultaneous Optimization of Dynamical Bioprocesses

It is known that the optimal control may introduce significant economical benefits into production processes, thus being an important and challenging research area with practical relevance. The modeling and optimization of biotechnological processes has been object of research and their related results have generated improvements in operating conditions and strategies, however, the inherent features of dynamical bioprocesses prevent the application of conventional optimization algorithms, hence making necessary the development of tailored methods and strategies. The objective of this work is to develop mathematical programming strategies for simultaneous optimization of dynamic systems and evaluate their computational performance. Simultaneous optimization with orthogonal collocation is applied to a simplified model for biosynthesis of penicillin from glucose, which was studied by Cuthrell and Biegler (1989). The results show that discretization of differential equations systems (DAE) by orthogonal collocation in finite elements efficiently transforms dynamic optimization problems into nonlinear programming (NLP) problems, enabling to solve complex problems with several control variables and minimizing the approximation error.