Automated Design of Batch Water-Allocation Network

Abstract The mathematical technique presented in this work deals with one step design of batch water-allocation network (WAN), where batch schedules, water-reuse subsystems, and wastewater-treatment subsystems are all taken into account. In the first place, a flexible schedule model is introduced to represent the precedence order of all operations. Then, two novel superstructures incorporating all basic elements (i.e. states, tasks, equipment and time) are adopted to capture all production schemes and batch WAN configurations. Specifically, by adding novel components in the original superstructure, a series of optimal network structures with multistage splitting and mixing options which have never been contained within previous superstructure can be easily generated. Finally, a reliable optimization strategy, where deterministic and stochastic searching techniques are combined, is suggested to deal with the resulting mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model. Two illustrative examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.