Abstract
Heat integration of continuous processes is a widely studied research area, where many approaches have been developed to minimize cold and hot utility usage. Batch processes require additional consideration for the planning of the heat exchanger network: since the flows are not always present in the system, their timing has to be considered as well.
Both heat integration and scheduling of batch processes are highly complex, their combination is expected to be even higher. Several papers have already addressed the integrated problem in the last decade (Majozi, 2006, Chen and Chang, 2009, Halim and Srinivasan, 2011). Adonyi et. al. (2003) has presented an algorithm to minimize the utility usage for a given time horizon. Their approach assumed, however, that heat exchangers are present for all of the hot-cold stream pairs. Moreover, each hot or cold stream was allowed to be matched with only one hot or cold stream, respectively, further heat demands of the stream had to be satisfied from utilities.
The aim of this work is to present an extension of Adonyi et. al.'s approach by allowing the streams to have heat exchanges with multiple other streams. The newly presented approach also takes into account the limitation on the number of available heat exchangers and their scheduling.
