Interactive Approaches in Chemical Process Design

Interactive multi-objective optimization methods have considerable advantages over the methods mentioned above. However, they have been used very rarely in chemical engineering. For example, interactive methods can not be found in the survey of Marler and Arora (2004) and they are only briefly mentioned in Andersson (2000) and Bhaskar et al. (2000). This might be due to the lack of knowledge of interactive methods or the lack of appropriate interactive multi-objective optimization software. The few examples of interactive multi-objective optimization in chemical engineering include Grauer et al. (1984) and Umeda and Kuriyama (1980). 

In what follows, we describe and summarize research on multi-objective optimization in chemical engineering reported in Hakanen (2006) and Haka-nen et al. (2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2007). These studies have focused on offering chemical engineering an efficient and practical way of handling all the necessary aspects of the problem, that is, to be able to simultaneously consider several conflicting objective functions that affect the behaviour of the problem considered. Therefore, they have been solved using the interactive NIMBUS method. 

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