Analytical Investigations Analytical Investigations in Process Synthesis and Process Operations. Two distinct solution philosophies have emerged through the study of process synthesis and process operations problems in recent years.
Heuristics offer fast solutions but no guarantee of optimality.
Optimization approaches, on the other hand, offer rigor but suffer combinatorial explosion of computational requirements. Our work in this area addresses the following fundamental questions. The long term goal of this work is to build an optimization-based science of heuristics that will lead to the design of new, provably optimal heuristics for process synthesis and operations.