Geographic and process information systems for multi-facility design and operation

Chemical processes are not isolated from their environment. From their design, site selection and plant layout to their operation, they interact with existing processes. These processes can be natural, such as a river, or artificial, such as other plants. The objective of this thesis is to formalize the issues in designing and operating chemical facilities such that other systems, both natural and artificial are considered part of the problem definition. This requires the synthesis of disparate types of information.; In this dissertation an overall framework for combining geographic and process information is developed. This framework has four components: production processes, environmental processes, spatial information and decision-making. The framework is used in investigating four different aspects of multifacility design and operation.; First, a facility layout problem is posed using an hybrid mixed integer linear programming formulation, and integrated with the geographic information containing knowledge about the environs of the new facility. Using computational geometry concepts with a Geographic Information System and a mathematical model of layout decisions a richer picture of the layout problem can be constructed and used. Besides decreasing the solution time by additional constraints, the methodology results in more realistic decisions and allows post-solution analysis within the same framework (Ozyurt and Realff, 1999b).; Second, the interaction of two processes and the environment is modeled to access the environmental impact of several processes within a watershed of the river. The operational decisions are shown to be important for impact minimization depending on the location and simple river and ecology characteristics, represented with GIS and an environmental model. By integrating the decision-making for production processes with environmental processes will help to access the impact of the former to the environment directly (Ozyurt and Realff, 1998).; Third, the overall framework is used to synthesize industrial complexes which exchange material for pollution prevention. The methodology screens possible candidates, using a new concept of feasibility contours to locate feasible matches. The overall framework is used to find the optimal matches, with the minimum environmental impact, using process and multimedia modeling. This systematic approach for the synthesis of industrial complexes can be used in macro-level pollution prevention practices (Ozyurt and Realff, 1999a).; Finally, a Geographic Information System, process and environmental modeling is used to design process systems for multi-site collaborations. A wastewater treatment plant shared by two processes near a river is considered as an example to showcase the approach. Also, a food processing-agriculture based industrial complex, where several new facilities are designed and integrated with existing ones, is synthesized using the same approach.; Our main contributions are a framework for the representation and use of geographic information for decision-making in the process industry and the development of rigorous model-based analysis and synthesis tools for environmental impact minimization and ecological compatibility of process systems.