Inter-process Heat Integration by Coordination among Agent Systems for Heat Exchanger Network Design

Abstract Pinch technology is one of the commonly used energy-saving technologies in chemical industries. We have proposed a simulation framework using multiagent into the design of heat exchanger network (HEN) to save the energy usage and to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. We set up several HEN Design Agents and each agent had different strategy to search candidate segments of HEN to modify. In our previous study, HENs for only a single process was optimized by the multiagent system at a time. However in general, there are some abutting chemical processes in a site. The interprocess heat integration, that is heat giving and heat receiving between a process and the others, is effective for energy saving in addition to the internal heat integration in a single process. In this study, we introduced Coordinator agent within the multiagent framework to achieve both inner-process and inter-process heat integration simultaneously.