Reachability analysis of a biodiesel production system using stochastic hybrid systems

Modeling and analysis of chemical reactions are critical problems because they can provide new insights into the complex interactions between systems of reactions and chemicals. One such set of chemical reactions defines the creation of biodiesel from soybean oil and methanol. Modeling and analyzing the biodiesel creation process is a challenging problem due to the highly-coupled chemical reactions that are involved. In this paper we model a biodiesel production system as a stochastic hybrid system, and we present a probabilistic verification method for reachability analysis. Our analysis can potentially provide useful insights into the complicated dynamics of the chemicals and assist in focusing experiments and tuning the production system for efficiency. The verification method employs dynamic programming based on a discretization of the state space and therefore suffers from the curse of dimensionality. To verify the biodiesel system model we have developed a parallel dynamic programming implementation that can handle large systems. Although scalability is a limiting factor, this work demonstrates that the technique is feasible for realistic biochemical systems.