Patent ID: 9704116
Date: 2017-07-11
CPC Classifications: G06Q

Claim:
1. A computer-controlled method of optimizing a manufacturing process having source materials, intermediates, products and media storages, the method comprising: obtaining a model describing relations between source materials, intermediates and product flows; setting upper and lower bounds for each of the source materials, intermediates and product flows, for storage capacities and for combinations of multiple flows; obtaining a first set of external flows constrained to specified values including at least one source whose supply has to be fully consumed and at least one product whose demand has to be fully satisfied; determining estimates of future values of the first set of external flows as well as estimates of the upper and lower bound of the first set of external flows; determining a second set of external flows with requirements on total production or consumption for fixed periods of time, where these the requirements are subject to contracts, periodically negotiated with distribution network operators; obtaining varying costs of raw materials and products; computing optimized flows of sources, intermediates and products so that all constraints are satisfied and a profit is maximized over a time horizon and, produced or consumed amounts of media under contract since a beginning of a contracting period are within a region guaranteeing satisfying the contract for any combination of trajectories of fixed external flows from the upper and lower bounds; sending the optimized flows or only the next step values of the optimized flows to sub-ordinate controllers to be enforced on the process; receiving process values for intermediates, product flows, and storage to update states of intermediates, product flows, and storage by replacing the states with the estimates; repeating the determining estimates, obtaining varying costs, computing optimized flows, sending the optimized flows and receiving process values with an optimization horizon moved one time-step forward, wherein a requirement of produced or consumed amounts of media under contract since the beginning of the contracting period being in a region guaranteeing satisfying the contract for any combination of trajectories of fixed external flows from the upper and lower bounds is implemented as a soft constraint adding a penalty on a square of a distance of a trajectory from the region to an optimization criterion with a weighting parameter, or an optimization cost function for computing flows contains also a penalty on squares of time increments of flows in order to achieve a smooth and well posed solution; and controlling physical flows of sources, intermediates and products in accordance with the computed optimized flows.