Scheduling of hybrid chemical plants using First-Order Hybrid Petri Nets

Summary from only given. Hybrid Petri Net is a popular formalism in modeling hybrid production systems. Due to their hybrid nature, scheduling and throughput optimization of these systems are complex problems. A notable amount of researches have been done on different methods for scheduling of either continuous or batch chemical plants, however there is a lack of research in the scheduling of mixed batch/continuous systems. In this paper, First-Order Hybrid Petri Net (FOHPN) is used to model a mixed batch/continuous chemical plant. A sugar milling case study is analyzed using FOHPN and the optimization results are compared with those of integrated Timed Arc Hybrid Petri Nets (TAHPN) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach, and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approach presented in other papers. Simulation results not only show an improvement in production rates, but they also show considerable reduction in computation time. This reduction in computational time enables one to control the plant in real time through a supervisory control scheme.