The Research of Optimal Plant Layout Optimization based on Particle Swarm Optimization for Ethylene Oxide Plant

In the fields of plant layout optimization, the main goal is to minimize the construction cost including pipelines as satisfying all constraints such as safety and operating issues. However, what is the lacking of considerations in previous researches is to consider proper safety and maintenance spaces for a complex plant. Based on the mathematical programming, MILP(Mixed Integer Linear Programming) problems including various constraints can be formulated to find the optimal solution which is to achieve the best economic benefits. The objective function of this problem is the sum of piping cost, pumping cost and area cost. In general, many conventional optimization solvers are used to find a MILP problem. However, it is really hard to solve this problem due to complex inequality and equality constraints, since it is impossible to use the derivatives of objective functions and constraints. To resolve this problem, the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), which is one of the representative sampling approaches and does not need to use derivatives of equations, is employed to find the optimal solution considering various complex constraints in this study. The EO (Ethylene Oxide) plant is tested to verify the efficacy of the proposed method.