Capacitors in radial/mesh distribution systems are used to supply reactive power to minimize loss and to improve the voltage profile. The appropriate placement of capacitors is also important to ensure that system power losses and total investment capacitor costs are minimal. The capacitor placement problem consists of finding specific sitting and sizing to install capacitor banks in an electri...

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 pr...

We propose a new method to obtain the global optimum of MINLP problems containing bilinearities. Our special method that contracts the bounds of one variable at a time allows reducing the gap between eceived in revised form 6 April 2010 ccepted 8 April 2010 vailable online 14 April 2010 eywords: athematical programming ptimization a linear lower bound and an upper bound obtained solving the ori...

A hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm which includes two alternative gradient-based methods for handling constraints has been proposed to solve process synthesis and design problems which involve continuous and binary variables and equality and inequality constraints (a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, MINLP). The first method for handling constraints uses the Newton-Raphs...

ABSTRACT: The paper presents the discrete dimension optimization of unbraced rigid steel plane frames. The optimization of steel frames was carried out by the Mixed-Integer Non-linear Programming (MINLP) approach. The MINLP is a combined discrete-continuous optimization technique. It performs the discrete optimization of discrete decisions simultaneously with the continuous optimization of cont...

This paper presents an Equality Relaxation variant to the Outer-Approximation algorithm for solving mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems that arise in structural optimization of process flowsheets. The proposed algorithm has the important capability of being able to explicitly handle nonlinear equations within MINLP formulations that have linear integer variables and linear/nonl...

Abstract In this paper, an open-source solver for mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems is presented. The Supporting Hyperplane Optimization Toolkit (SHOT) combines a dual strategy based on polyhedral outer approximations (POA) with primal heuristics. POA achieved by expressing the feasible set of MINLP problem linearizations obtained extended supporting hyperplane (ESH) and cutt...

This paper proposes a new MINLP model for heat exchanger network synthesis that includes streams with phase change. The model considers every possible combination of process streams that may arise within a chemical process: streams with sensible heat, streams with latent heat, and streams with both latent and sensible heat. As part of the optimization strategy, the superstructure is modeled wit...

This paper presents an efficient optimization algorithm for mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem resulting from multiple partially linearized (MPL) model based control of nonlinear hybrid dynamical system (NHDS). The algorithm uses structural information of the canonical MPL framework and derives comparatively easier quadratic programming (QP) primal problem as well as an MILP ma...