Improved simulated annealing algorithm for synthesis of heat integrated distillation sequences
A simulated annealing based approach was developed for the synthesis of large-scale heat integrated distillation sequences.The synthesis problem was formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem into which a more efficient representation of network structure and a more rigorous cost model were introduced. With the consideration of the characteristics of the studied problem,the simulated annealing algorithm was improved so that it could handle structural and parametric optimization simultaneously within the same annealing scheme, and could attain reasonable trade-off between computational accuracy and speed. The proposed approach was shown to be effective by the solution of larger-scale examples (the number of products≥10).